You with your forest webbed ribs, waterfall vein lines—
where are you now winged back girl?
Clusters of stars gulps and nuclear fission
on your lips,
I use to feel that fish scaled decay like pressure
on my sucked bones,
I use to taste you
like the absence of sunlight.
Gama rays magnified
the dead cells of our skeletons,
I change and change
and the whole Earth bows when you cry,
it’s only starvation, it’s only icicles frozen
where you use to pull the rain out of the sky
and bathe us all.
Dirty feet led you to the cracks in the mantle,
it led the fire to burn the radioactive particles
off your pearl skin.
You use to be mine before the light fractured
and the collapse of stars swam
into your belly like medicine—
you awoke gasping and atomic,
ripping apart
smaller and smaller.