a return to form

By Emma Kearny

it starts as a suggestion in the back of your mind, a quietly invasive worm wriggling its way into the cracks of your skull, an insistence that something is wrong but you can’t say what, there’s only this weighted dread threatening to crush your ribs like an EMT, who maybe you should consider calling but that feels silly doesn’t it? because there can’t actually be anything wrong, and so you suck in a breath and calm yourself the best you can but this is your second mistake — the first was cracking your head on the concrete, letting the scent of your blood permeate the earth and invite it in — it kisses your wound shut but your body, it realizes, is an open sore, and so it digs itself deep into the layers of your skin and pushes your bones out of its way, proceeds with a lovingly delicate symphysiotomy to clear the way for your fingers, cracks your highest vertebra and slide it into the column of your throat to make way for its mouth, wrings your intestines out of your stomach and settles them into art for you, which inclines you to bite your tongue off and replace it with the ileocecal valve and chew the rest until your teeth fall out and grow in anew like fingernails, and you swallow the old ones and feel some of them get stuck to the back of your throat while the others accumulate at the mouth of the carrion flower that sits inside your pelvis, and you find that the muscles beneath your skin jump and twitch like they’re more alive than you are, until it kisses them too and with its earthy lips swallows them and spits them out again in a dance that leaves you staggered and burned and beautiful, and its last act of violent adoration is to cut you open once more and allow you to marvel at what’s become of your insides, which writhe and sing gorgeously, and in your awe you sing too, so loud that the teeth in your throat taste the sweetness of blood.