I HAVE BEEN, I AM, I WILL BE
There is a shell inside of my stomach.
I once basked in a shocking blue silence, sand slowly eking away at the sides of me, moss growing in my basin and reaching up towards a juvenile sun. I was always being carved away, and growing out despite it. A beating, pink harmony of life squabbling over who would have me next. Iridescent slivers of skin like promises against the hard calcium, infinitely broken paths of light attracting the mouths of strange creatures to kiss against what one day might be a spine. I feel them still, a scale flush against my hide. Phantom glimpses of those waters, shivering in the early morning when I dare to open my eyes.
There is a beetle sat flush to my heart.
My antenna tingles at incoming rain, a pressure from all directions that seeps into the soil and finds me in a decomposing log. I feel its rhythm in the resinous heartwood, a dance that pushes plasma through every perforation in tissue, like water rushing in through the cracks. There is warmth in the green, in the ringed layers that can be cracked open like a diary and read to the millipedes and worms. There are ants here that will one day be people; people touching arms in the street and feeling their thoraxes convulse with recognition, turning over their shoulder to see the split second impression of their interconnected soul. Will I be sitting nearby, watching from a bench or street corner, witness again to the pulsing thread of life?
There is a coyote behind my tongue.
I ran unbathed through prairie fields, spring flowers pressed under my paws like the soil might preserve them— might fossilize their perfect petals into minerals and keep the remnant of my body tucked into the earth. The mosquitos glance off my fur as I weave through sweetgrass and yarrow, passing dens full of lovers with their canines flush against the others neck. They are tangled in bramble, in blankets, in bedside tables and bruises like brackish water. The light of the moon flattens time, and the crescent that smiles at me from the sky will bare its teeth again when I have shed my fur and slipped silently into blushing skin, a werewolf’s transformation cast in an arc across thousands of years. I hum with the urge to strip bare and follow paths these feet have never known. I wake with hyssop behind my ears and grass stains on my knees.
There are things that grew in me only because you put them there, embedded from a tight hug goodbye. There are places in my body where my childhood dog still roams, soft paws against cartilage. There is a universe that speaks to itself when I dip my hands in the ocean, fingers dusting through the sand.
There is a shell inside of my stomach. There is a beetle sat flush to my heart. There is a coyote behind my tongue. There is a time where I will be pressed, joyously, into whatever I will be next.
Starr, 23, Sunshine Coast - Canada ✯ TT: @iamstarrz
“Starr is a playwright, freak of nature, and horror enthusiast currently interested in exploring their relationship to the body and the great beyond. They obsess over vintage jewelry, burlesque, and 90’s vampire movies.”