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
