She paused for some time at the gate,
failing light passing through her skin.
She felt the plum of her living heart
strain veils of viscera to the unhinged
cup of clavicle, bellied ribs
undone by the wings of a dove:
the breathless little bird whose winds fluttered,
heavier than a feather.

He suckled from her scalp.
She fit his fists in her mouth.
They had not yet untangled
whose body was whose.

The door stood open for several weeks
impossibly
while the web spun between them in the womb
became the slow unraveling of a cocoon.