10:53

I have had to live with all of the time and experience of this past week inside of me and now my body is swollen; I touch my skin and water moves through the organic fabric and it stays over the muscle like damp paper, my tattoos stretching into bruises. My ears feel clouded with fluid but I hear every sound. I am inside-out. I recognize everything.

I continue to drink, cups next to my bed, green glass bottles all over my bedroom floor and I have to walk on them, my arms outstretched, balancing as they roll and shatter, pieces of whatever is left over stuck in my feet and the marks on my thighs. I have kaleidoscope soles now and when I sit in the sun I can stretch my arches and toes and compare the color of shrapnel (some are clear, others opaque from the bridges of cell growth), which is like reading the future and the past together, as if I had gone back to create my own life.

I map my face in the same manner, the lines around the cheekbones from starvation, the scars on my chin from an empty stomach. I have tried to pull of the expressions, but they are attached to the nerves and my body rejected different cartilage, even the black and peach powders, which rolled off of my soft jaw with the liquid that was already gathering inside of me before I knew what it was, blaming my river-body on the heat and sweat. I can feel the bacteria in my abdomen and the beginnings of bones. Only my lips stay static because they have remembered you, even if we have just met.

I have more to give you but the water is still leaking out of the source into my chest, its own mouth like a cervix, dumping out mucous and blood. I am horrified to see myself cut open and only find organs and a spine as I know the worlds in my capillaries, the cocoons that look like marrow, the foxes that crawl out of my liver, the apples and sugar and genderless criminals hanging from my neck. There is a surface with the microscopic, fertilized egg sharing its space that can create life or rupture a fallopian tube.

I want to write prayers to emotion, because that must be what exists once the limbs decompose, and in my mind gravity and mathematics and animals and heaven are made of the matter of feeling, the force behind full connection.