husk, hunger. there is so much i am learning to yield
to… budless vases, fallen steeple, music that fractures
into confession when it flees the mouth, et cetera. a myth:
my voice’s sound never scares me. i know my name
is outside of me. it grew once from a forest’s garden.
everyone who walked through was dying & nobody
reaping whatever may defy the origin of grief. nobody
wants silence to breed only silence. let the trees yield
some new fruit i may hold in my hands; the garden
would admit this: every stem & sepal fractures
when left unseen for long enough. i have no name
for how birth forever marks a person. etches a myth
that burst from fists full of seeds, made invisible. myth
is all i can make of a country i lost; i translate my body
back from the indecipherable. how do i love the names
of a lineage i’ll never know, but whose shadows i yield
in an attempt to pull song from the deep grey fractures
in the ice now enveloping everything in the garden
i’m assigned but never feel i can claim. the garden
christens me daughter, but i know of girlhood as myth
—a lustrous guillotine—within which i fracture
—if fracture is a method of survival. if my body
is a home, it is ghost-ridden. in place of desire, yielding
to shame became the usual ritual. a way to name
that glass exposing a face i’ve looked away from: name
it mirror, then watch it shatter & fall like a garden’s
image lit across cathedral windows. let my palms yield
only softness, only the godless prayers. there are myths
i won’t worship; others whose absence turns my body
into a sourceless river—rushing to where it fractures,
to a place the body may spill into and be held. fracture,
perhaps, is just a place of remaking. i give it this name
to make it believable. say it is, because i fear no body
can sustain its own barrelling current & live. i, garden
i can resurrect. i, shadow. i, song. i am trying to myth
myself into existence. name remade: the fruit i’ll yield.
working to resist its fracture point—will symbol yield
my body to truth or sever me from it. another myth:
my name. a kind of symbol i croon back to the garden.