like a whale
by Nubia
I
I spent an hour becoming electric, a year embracing the engine, a decade honing the labor for the breach (limbed-eggshell exit). I wanted to be removed from the body. I needed an expedition, a gaseous exploration of the milk of heaven without the wired cage of rib
and skeleton directing me back to form. I limply ascended into the rotations of the atmosphere. Each layer of its worldly breath combed methodical. Every stroke removing a different system.
The skin released like cellophane. The vessels untangled. The muscles slid off the slippery bones and the bones broke infinitely into dust. Each organ floated on the weight of its importance, all eventually returning to the surface.
II
and earth parts as incision, breaks, bleeds for implantation, and a kidney folds into the soil to sprout roots that navigate the underground landscape like an addict licking at ecstasy, choking sleeping crops that willingly award their flesh to the growth—a glutton
collecting dead colonies and extinct species until there’s nothing left and it adopts the pulse of its sibling heart rotting in the branches of a tree outside a town devoid of electricity as the planet is drained
and the humans fall four-legged and foam at the mouth, encrust themselves in their drippings, harmonize with the apocalyptic song of behavior, as all purpose abandons culture
except the life now being pushed up from under, birthed renal from the urine-soaked soil, at the peak of realization, the body abundant, the wounds of the psyche unconsciously ripe.
III
I wake in reinvention. Unstitched. Seamless as porcelain. Rejected from death with no markers of reanimation. Coated in hot mud. Young fungus still maturing on every surface of the mouth.
I glow celestial. Recall the moments of being without body and the warm-blooded heat of a mammal. No threat of injury. No consuming paranoia boarding up the masses behind walls of refuge and sanctuary. The anxious lose the appendage of worry. The disheartened peel from the husk of melancholy.
IV
and Earth parts as incision, breaks, bleeds for expulsion, and a kidney is rejected, sagging parasitic, folding up inside a lunar crater to die, and the humans lie dormant below the moon shedding its dead weight, hibernating in their wet nests, knees pressed to chests in the fetal position, comatose for the next millennium.
V
Origin: thinnest layer of the unfamiliar, stretched vellum wrapped around the universe. The place of my restoration when seeped seed-like back underground. Like a whale, born into a bucket of dust, swallowed up whole by the ocean.
