lagom
“The world doesn’t exist for the I. It doesn’t exist for anything. It exists to continue existing. ”
In the state of non-being // of becoming // I entered the rock and the wind. The desert told me many things and I listened to each grain of sand. A woman’s shadow appeared many times between the stones. Pillars were erected and fell simultaneously. Part of me watched with a wet tongue that scraped the blue from the celing. And part of me watched with my eyes closed and palms clasped at my chest with that little striped sandbag sweating at my breastbone. In that sheet of white and silver, I felt the feathers against my cheeks and knew. Recognition of the thing that followed me down the gravel pathway in Arizona. Something pushing, like the yolk caught in its shell. Pressure is precious; without enough, you are static and with too much chaos—Rock and Wind, and a sheet in between them that slithers. I witnessed a woman dancing and the lasso whipped overhead in wide circles that spun counterclockwise for Medusa. She has a stone gaze, and the snakes are moving, constantly moving. The hiss brought me upright and the serpent spanned from my pelvis to lips into that little plastic bucket. Black ink, I wrote my name. Stephanie. It fits me as a snail to its shell and I sat with Her and watched the tide come. Wet, it was so wet, brimming with starseeds. I caught them in my palms. When I reached my hand to my face, it came back covered in white: mucus. A baby slurped from its womb and wanted to be wiped down. I combed the cosmos from my skin with more white tissues. The thing I spit up is the thing that has followed me since I was eleven years old. It never belonged to me; I just never knew how to give it back. Standing is for giving, sitting for studying, and lying for receiving. I reclined in that awe-struck suton and watched the angles move in pole directions. Right and left, up and down; the woman had no eyes to see me with. She knew I was right there with her, bearing witness to it all.
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