The Elephants

after thawafter aspen:
fog erases syntax

i speak a language of carbon
nitrogenphosphoruswater

mushrooms root
the forest floor
through red mineral horizon
‘round my rugged stem

each whispered web stretches
from ringed legacy
to ringed legacy

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]
] i was animal
]
] devoured
]
]

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] horse loggers
]
]
] bark beetles
]
] i evacuate my bones

let my flesh turn to tomb
an archive of misremembered
memorieslodged
in the spacebetween my lungs

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in a thin voice

youth erodes—
a strange language prayerful
resurrected

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my scales spent years      in silence     alongside     the hollow vowels     of a whale     echoing   through oil-black     ocean

---

im smaller than a syllable body of fire coral & salt
my waterlogged languagedissolves with each inhale
mwtrlggdlnggdsslvswthchnhl

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make me the colossal squid
not the one thawing in a salt bathcorehalf-frozenflesh
moon-pale & dissected
but the one who lurks in the Antarctic abysssearching bony
maps for seamountssolace
f l o a t i n g
through the submarine cryosphere

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what i mean is
i know what it’s like to hold a dead animal
in my hands, to carve out creature’s breath
with bone knife, to know the precise weight
of its limp body, without ever looking
into its eyes—

i pretend to know

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frac/ture of flesh & bone

]
] interglacial period
]

then:   tectonic shift—

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I want to breathe, and mean it.