when you say a woman is a goddess, remember that Eris was a goddess too. it's Thanksgiving and I'm thinking of my mother, a woman so powerful she traveled back in time to the origin of the human race and, Pandora like, granted us a gift we never wanted: a fear of abandonment so strong we give up before we try. but unlike Pandora, naive and innocent, my mother did it out of spite. she was born a black hole. not a normal black hole, or even a super massive black hole, but the black hole at the center of the universe. she was the Big Bang. she was the originator who became the destroyer. she consumes light, hope, little girls. whole worlds collapse. she is the solar sundew, the eater of flesh, bone, ash. her leavings, lifeless space bodies, aimless carcasses who no longer remember where they came from, who can no longer imagine where they're going. trails of dead stars, fused relics of base metals. she's not like our ancestors, the ancestors of mortals, she's the ancestress of the neutron star that shines only in death, bastard smear of radiation fixed by the eclipsing eye of a camera lost in space. unrelenting. purposeless. the cat that drops the mouse, still warm, she keeps her hands in carved out rib- cages, tent poled to hold up her fitted hide, a wicked pneuma exhaled over a blasted landscape of calcaneus bones never lifted above untrodden paths, leathery alveoli never filled by the only inheritance we were ever offered. why, she might have asked, need they light when they have no eyes? and she ate away the sun. why, she might have asked, need they walk when there is no path? and she ate away their feet. why, she might have asked, need they speak, breathe, crash through, rupture, evolve, awaken, when no elementary particle escapes the spiraling drain, the suffocating death, the translucent fading into a single dimension, into an outline, into an unlimned representation of what never was, a remnant of what never existed? and she gave birth to me.
November 26, 2021
