I hover above the breaking. I am already a memory. Why call it dissociation? I call it the fixed point of light that renders our new landscape shades of decay. I cannot look at the gilded spoilage from this war. The children paint fables on their cheeks. They sprout leaves where their spines round with the new weight of carrying. Everything in our house turns to soil, fertile loam for the growing time. What are we if not saplings? I am a patient gardener. I watch our swell, calculate the tongue-split new leaves that form first as tight-fisted buds. In the evenings, I check for signs of disease: a misshapen twig, a browning root. My daughter wears moss like a mask. My son’s veins swallow light. In the morning, they twist blankets around their trunks, bend toward the sun—their radiance finds me rooted in a corner.

This is the event horizon—a shift at black. A snail encircles the ringed form ofa seed imbued with extrapolations my life canwonder at. Here, I ama dove, winged & solitary. Above, I am string holding together the knitcoils of my daughter’s sweater. There, I am the bridge of a knifehandle held between the teeth of a larger form, perhaps a gale wind, perhaps a snake?Am I the center of permutations—a row of chrysalidesbreeding bodies, each more deranged than the last?

] On the other side of after, silence reigns silver. I must live with this now—death hush, choked torrent, plaintive grasp. There is skin, but it’s scaled. There is a cone where my neck should be. My forehead arches toward hieroglyphic wanderings–the letter l, a narrow column, a steel arrow. Cracked cage, you bore me forth only to find the earth is snow and my body is an imprint, a marking, a dent on its pale visage. [