1.

“We have, I think, great terror of pain, and consequent resistance to what it can teach.”

–Louise Gluck

freedom is a cage of smudged windows, or it is a knot in my stomach, wriggling.

I dream of white frogs at night in pools covered in tea lights and women swimming ahead to cavern and I feel caterpillars washed in symbol, incubated, sliding through my gut, inching their way from corporeal packages when the day is warm and facing them. unbridled when the wind is favorable, my exodus through speech prevails. from chrysalis to window, cracking pane and tracing spit like slug on glass to mark the gust that carries it. from gut to chest to windpipe: carved. how screams are rushed when pushed, or just when they finally meet the Earth as voluble flutter that maims itself to form.

“Arachne”