Consolidation

Once, a woman asked her daughter to eclipse 
herself in the vowels of her name. O, O, O,

she said, clasping her daughter’s cold mouth—
or was it the throat? Perhaps the entire

body, starved & syllabic, ready to regurgitate 
the words end & young & I can’t possibly know

what I long to say. A certain longing ingrains 
itself into opening’s soft absence. Listen:

I am holding that O in ungrown hands, lips 
parted, waiting to swallow or else baffle,

as how my mother was when told to possess 
herself. How could I encircle anything? she asked.

How does a woman have an “own”? She was lying 
there—not anywhere but there—in skinless

sunlight, the kind in treeless cities, maybe 
the part with the o pulled out of body. B-dy—

how claustrophobic it is, no room to hide 
in its o-less dash. Yes, women are lying

here, inhaling as sounds & bodies & all this 
dispossession is extracted with incisive. Of course,

I cannot remember the end. But we (yes, there 
is a we in this) are whispering, in the most real

(& fictive) way possible You see her? No, yes—
I mean I love. I really do. This, inevitably, is true.

Read more from Issue 20.1.