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there was an I before this, I remember it, and all these heads fanned out from it like leaves, and I cannot find it now, it is like looking in a heap of jetsam for the one toy you loved as a child.
:: Look at the monster, holding its stunted hands out to its food, begging surcease. ::
This is your blood, it is all over me,
[we]
drown in it. Make it stop. I am finished with this now.
:: You wanted all the others—am I not sweet enough to join my sisters? I can hear, at night, the city not far off, the hurrying men with arms full of jars and clothing and cups, but all I see is trees, trees and you, green and terrible among them, and this place is sticky with blood and saliva and urine. It is our nest, and you are like a moth
er, ripped open to let her babies out, but nothing comes from you, they are stuck, stuck like hooks in a carp’s mouth, and I am telling you that I am willing, willing to go where they have gone— ::
Tell me about your trees, Kushinada, tell me what color they will be when they come cracking through
—our—
spine.
:: Far off from the house my mother :: Mother!
[Mother!]
Always Mother, sloughing her children off of herself like old robes, and then she vanishes, yes, vanishes, and there were no trees where I was born, none at all, but your
*our*
mother did it too, she spat you
[us]
out among the flowers and then filled you
/us/
up with fish eyes until it was time to give you
—us—
us, yes, us, give us all to the man who was
{neither old nor young,}
|who was neither handsome nor ugly,|
( who was neither fat nor thin,)
neither, neither, neither
:: my mother was fishing, sitting propped against a stone by a little pond, and the air was golden and still, golden and still under the flowering cassia, the yellow blossoms and the red bark, and the smell of cinnamon floating over the rippleless water :: Mother squeezed
me/us
out into the wriggling silver, the wriggling silver and the salt churn, she pushed and pushed and I
|we|
dribbled from her like pus, like a tumor, like a
