helli fang

Outside,

I watch my mother break open an egg:

her hands cradling the freckled shell with

such mercy, as if she could still hear it breathe,

before breaking the surface, a canary’s glass eye

sobbing between her knuckles. How I wanted

my body to open that way. As if everything

left to swallow in this world was already

inside of me, waiting to fill some stranger’s

half-open palm. Two strangers lying facedown

in a garden ask about danger, their mouths full

of milkweed. Why is it that the more we touch

each other, the smaller we feel? Maybe the

only thing we were meant to taste is the flesh

of our own prayers. Not the curtain of rain falling

from our cheekbones, not the seed-shaped

whiskey stain on the bedsheets, not the orange peel

pulled taut against our teeth. Despite love—despite

suffering. Outside, a man lights a cigarette

with nothing but the burning antler of a deer.

I didn’t watch him do it, but I believed it from

the way he smiled afterwards, tea-stained and loose,

as if there was nothing on earth more sweet

than the smoke rising from the body of another.

IGNITION