You open your jaws, wide as bone allows.
From the spaces between your teeth
people fall like blood-heavy snowflakes.
Grandmother, brother, mother, daughter,
all made up of paper-mache.
Everyone in front of you sways,
backs arched, lips curled,
curdled like milk in the summer’s heat.
They protect the fragility flying over them.
Wishing cracked and broken things whole.
They fold and tear like origami. Your
brain illuminates itself, paper lantern.
Brightening the thin walls before you.
The weightless, the worldly and the writhing.
They breathe easy.
They peer into our lungs, divulging our restlessness,
our dreaming. Only their synapses
remain, blood slick;
they bind and unbind to yours.
Consciousness ends and consciousness begins.
Consciousness ends and blood begins.
We are unholy Goddesses.
We are unholy goodness.
We are unholy and unbroken and good and God.
This is the only form of song, the pitch from our neurons,
the blood beneath our fingernails, the swaying, the swaying,
these minds and minds
and the never-ending
mindfulness. These crawling, floating,
grieving, forgiving minds.