The unimaginable zero summer lies in the water
A water grey with the half-time break
Where mother takes a breath
A breath that sends chills up every nerve ending, even in the tips of fingers
When the sun is a bleached dot in a faded sky
And the evergreen wilts to clay
The sounds of the water hitting sand in the tide
And the rustling of the leaves weaving to make the ceiling
Are no longer welcoming comforts
But detached, careless, and fierce
Any young are burrowed away
A short-notice hibernation with mom and dad and half stock
The black no longer a vast night sky
But a lurking cold beneath pale, cycling feet
That are numb, frozen
Zero

I went
downtown
alone,

I crept
along
your old haunts

I found
a well sat
cubicle,

and curled myself
up

in the
thought
of us

I can’t be delicate,
small, sad-looking and innerly folding,
my legs will never oragami-fold themselves
over my tired tired fat chest   .

I am blessed to be big, though
my *** is a curse, how it juts and forces
itself to be known by peoples’ eyes and
rudely introduces itself to chairs, knick knacks,

anything unfortunate enough to exist
within its gargantuan wake  .

I am blessed to be huge but small,
I am blessed to warmly ******* and spill
my flesh over everything I touch & taste;

I am forced to give myself up to
the world, to give my huge body up as
comfort to the multitudes of humans
I love and crave and want and dream up

because they will never find me small and cowered,
will never offer their bodies
to comfort mine, assuming instead that
my huge warmth can sustain its
own flame .

My own body can’t contain the
sad swells and lovely lakes that surge
and bash against its own hide  --- - ---

that’s why my stretch marks
leak and tendril their way
around my arms,
my belly folds,
my underloved thighs,

and I wonder why we both want
to tender my fire
to a low smolder
and let it fade out

do we
think that trees with thick
lush, curved and pink
foliage are somehow
whole-er
than trees with paperthin leaves?

my bark still craves
the sun, which sometimes
comes in the form
of human flesh

I had a dream I killed you.
Threw knives at your fat chest,
held you under the bath
water when you were a baby.

Pinched your nose and covered
your mouth with a pillow,
gave you a razor and made you
do it yourself.

I woke up cold and strangely calm.
I woke up tired of both of us.
And under the yellowed, motheaten blankets,
I realized:

it was what we’d both always wanted.

I am a motherless neonate
I am lapping up dew
with my forked tongue
I am sliding my plated belly
over the cool wet grass

I am entirely my own
I am scouting out rabbit dens
ambitiously
I am engulfing beauty
with my deep, long belly

I am a parentless subadult
I am basking out
under a full white moon
I am flicking out
my black-tipped tongue

I am an unashamed *******
I am unperturbed in my solitude
I am studied only in myself;

In another life, perhaps,
the sudden ruffle of leaves
to the left
would stir me
but here in my reptilian hide,
I am unflinching

I am a motherless neonate
and I blame
no one

Nothing is more chilled
than slanted sunrays through pines
trembling with want

Nor nothing worse than
the young cardi’nals trilling
out to the white trees

Voices unfalt’ring
answered only by echoes
of forgotten spring

Cold, thick powder snow
blithely reminds us of the
small, white spring hen eggs

that, forever lost,
cracked among the ****-strewn straw,
oozing into earth—

and I think of you,
whispering back to the birds,
just as lost as they

waiting for pre-spring
dew to unfreeze from the grass
that you may lap it

with painful blue eyes
like black-stripped and impish jays,
looking down on all.