The Uterine Gesture of Their BodiesWe believe in a daring oology with endless calcifications. You want to know the root of things, to point backwards toward the roaring cretaceous. I want something tiny to hold in my hand. We should discuss delicacy here, but you mustn't misunderstand: it means more than gastronomy, though the transparent-thin bones of a rainbow trout can summon all the same ennui. It's too simple to say life is fragile and I am fragile and I don't know about the world. Easier still to spin on this axis drunken or sleeping or watching the cat watch a cat outside. Fronts move in and fronts move out; ground water adjusts. An early cold snap sweetens the citrus or it doesn't; we move on and mistrust strangers who point out rot in our perfect oaks. It pains me to hear such accusations. I expect majesty to go on forever. You ask is this like the twin fetal fawns and I know almost. Peaks and PitsI want the shape of anything that changes. The tide and its increments, each wave an adjustment, cumulonimbus tragic and borderless. I want to cup my hand along the edge of something and instead I sublimate, my head a weighty idea bolstered by submitting to some kind of magic. Fog is romantic but not as romantic as believing yourself inside a cloud. Which makes me more grateful? Which more afraid? Fog, I know to find you in a field, you bedfellow of frost; I know to pin my eyes open on late and early drives. Cloud, you come and go at will. Mountains jut out only to recede with time. Glaciers freeze and melt, hulking and dormant. We are so like this fickle topography—growing hair and teeth only to lose them again, our height over time parabolic, our faces stretching and sagging without focus or grace. I could say I want the shape of anything stable and wait for you to tell me what I mean. I could seek clouds where they rest, on mountains still in their heydays, I could be a cool buzz on my own skin. Maybe the trickiest thing I could tell you is so much seems permanent at the time. Caroline Cabrera is the author of Flood Bloom (H_NGM_N BKS), and the chapbook, Dear Sensitive Beard (dancing girl press). Some of her recent poems appear or are forthcoming at B O D Y, Ilk, Sink Review, The Bakery and Whiskey Island. She lives in Fort Lauderdale.
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