I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess Poem by Safiya Sinclair

Our body antipodes. Brilliant lung and ten
good bones, crochet-neck umbilical, myself the yarn.
She carries her hands her hair around like ghosts,
my nocturne-unfamiliar, coiled interruptus
gooseflesh clouding our display case. Already twice myself
the noose.
No one has shattered that errant tooth, not even you.
The ocean sucks its salt appendage through my empty.
Already I have been a miracle, emerging
Still tending its incestuous wound.
And there goes our little world, set upon its haunches,
fraught with neglect—
Sister, we must eat.
Even the glittering oracle
of the bird-catcher spider offers nothing but the bones of bones.
Your carnivore unheaded what stalks our puncturing
what marks the mouth bewails its spaces, pines
for permission
to flush or anther.

Night prowls dangerous heavy.
Exhume a neon city. Our moon gone fat
With such astounding matter.
This feast parasitic.

Five days I watch its slow work with envy cough up
beak and penumbra. While our one mind hardens its
grief homicidal
till what inverts this lonesome dark I call thrall, luciferous.
Mine only.