Page 61 of Myths of Origin

:: she held the pole between her feet; it curved like a lazily drawn bow. ::

leech.

:: There were no tugs at the line; it hung limply as a spare koto-string. But, as afternoons will, the late sun brought a fish to the morsel of pig-gut on my mother’s crude hook, and in lurching forward to catch the suddenly taut pole from between her ankles, mother felt something tear inside her :: Ah, Kushinada!

*Kushinada!*

I know that tear! Please, I beg—yes, I beg, I am above nothing, lower than worms, than snails—make the blood stop. Be a good girl, be the good daughter,

(be a good girl)

{be the good daughter}

put your hands on me and plug up this wet mire

—reach up, baby sister, and we will carry you—

it will ooze between your fingers like menarche but don’t fear, don’t fear

:: and she caught her belly, gasped, fell forward on her knees and saw the fish in the water, pig-bowel dribbling from its piscine lip, looking at her through the filmy green pond. It blinked in the slant-light, and she breathed quick and fast :: there is a space in me

(there is a space in us)

the space from which all this miasma wells

/the place kept still and soft for you, Kushinada/

and that space was once empty, nothing more than a hollow between muscles

—it is not so bad here—

but now, now there are seven there, and their mouths make a chain, and they

|we|

are waiting for the weld of you, and

[we are the Mouth now,]

and I think if I could turn my heads just so

*if we could knot the body just so we might see ourselves*

I might see them inside me, holding hands, and out of their heads flower the branches that shiver my bones

:: quick and fast and low, and the grass was soaked with her water and her blood; her womb-water joined the green water and flowed in and out of the rosy fish’s gills ::

there were fish at my

(our)

birth, too, so many, all silvern and clear, and they smelled, oh, they smelled like

*sorrow*

lightning, and they weighed nothing at all, nothing—

:: and she bit down on a cassia branch in agony, and her mouth was flooded with the murky taste of cinnamon ::

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