excerpt from merrily merrily merrily merrily

CORPSE POSE

     Carry on, though your body screams Escape!, after you fall flat on your back again. Dip your heels into the floorboards. Ebb tide. The floor’s wooden slats buckle, then drift apart. Your calves sink into the new spaces. Above, seagulls siren for help. The boards have floated farther away. Waves, quick responders, raise the wayward onto a fleet of stretchers. Foam-boned arms help guide them out to sea. But one board kindly dropped anchor to stay your spine. The tide may be turning.

      Thighs fall open in surrender. Feet drift out to sea. A flock of seagulls descends with rope in their beaks to loop around your thighs, your knees, your shins. They fly your legs off to Morocco. So be it.

     Your furrowed face lets go and floats away. Such a reprieve. To let loose the stowaway calm hidden under your pretenses. Under your eyebrows flatlined with sorrow. Under that grave vein slashing an ambulance-ridden highway across your forehead. Learn how to strip it away like velcro. Scrub your skull clean and raw with rain water, fresh from the shore. Bodies remember all. A fragile electrical current has encouraged your brain to release oxytocin, knowing it will calm you. Somewhere deep within a flash captures and stores this complex trade, so you may enable it more easily next time. Perhaps without trying.

     Breathing slows. Shallows. Lungs dissolve. Their cells fly away as petals from flowering trees in spring. What was once your ribcage petrifies into ancestral whalebone. Some future schooner spies it from sea. The name aside the hull reads CHIMERA. Pass it by, commands the captain. We’re looking for Jonah. Moat alone for two more centuries.

     Wake as night falls. A wriggling within your chest. A tiny bird. Newborn, alien eyes and translucent skin. Saying Mama, feedplease. Mama, feedplease. Each pulse tethered irrepressibly to hunger pangs. Mama. Feedplease. The sisters still in their shells. Mama, feedplease. Day breaks. It’s been too long. Waiting has stretched the space between beats. Shrunk the bird’s stomach. Quieted your heart.
                      Mama             Ma
                                                    ma
                                                               Ma
                                                                                      ma
     The bird tumbles back into its eggshell, wingtips and tail first. The top of the egg closes to frame the bird’s new face. It pecks each shard back into a seamless shield. All is still.

     In the distance, a mourning dove’s call. You are stirring. The tiny bird cranes its ears beyond its shell. Perhaps it must be told that it’s okay. It is. Every thing is all right. You will stay safe and sound. You may wake now, and crack open to the world.