it’s quite understandable, really

There is a place that is somewhere between delirium and rage, coruscating happiness and blind-eye grief.

You want to know whose shoulders I am standing on? Everyone’s. My every breath has taken up more time and space and mind than I ever deserved, but it has taken it, and keeps on taking; I am a hungry animal and you looking fucking delicious. I have no answers, only more questions. I want to know why Marilou Valle died. I want to know why it took so long for Julie Soso, Loujaya Toni and Delilah Gore to come and eat at the big man’s table. I want I want I want I need I need I need and none of the declarative force of the pronoun erases the fact that I eventually I will take those things, none of which I ever deserved, because deserve is a whole bunch of bullshit and there is really only ask and take and want and need and power and hunger and force and rape and entitle and retitle and untitle and name and unnamed and shame and hurt and take and take and want and take.

And you want it all the way to the edges. Filling the jar, then the room, then the sky with your every particle evaporating and releasing. Poison the sky with your every exhalation.

You can have it.

For I am coming at you with big heart breaths.

Please. Take it. I never really wanted it. I only thought I wanted it because everyone else wanted it, and in fear of scarcity I made myself a greedy child. Spoiled entirely beyond recognition.  Take it. I have plenty. Take this subtle, beautiful rose, crush it in your hand and I will drink in deeply of the scent released, that moment of perfume just before you cast it down bruised to the ground. Take this tiny fragile egg. Gullet it and swallow it down whole and hard and I will watch the beauty of your throat swelling and think only of the honeymoon of your skin. Take this precious stone. Take it. I dug and dug until my nails were stumps and unstaunched, now pitch it up, throw it across this fallow field, I’ll marvel as it cuts the sky – see it! – see it! – catching the light through facet, that garnet-sparkle of sun like a splash of blood upon the dirt.

All is change.

I am coming at you with big heart breaths.

Lie down on my grave like my bed and in time, we will rot together.

I am so sorry that I had forgotten that I had so much. Please take it all. I don’t want it any more.

I have nothing to remember you by, and forgiving my sins with forgetfulness sounds so lazy; I whisper into the mossy rocks at Angkor Wat, my lips pressed against the cool and wondrous stone. I am wearing a white shirt and you have walked away from me in a beautiful cheong sam.

There is a place in your body where you look like a man and you look like a woman, then a place where you just look like a man. There is a muscle in my arm that feels like a man, a strength in my thigh covered by a softness which is both and neither, all running in skin to a pebble-nipple breast which is all woman.

I am coming at you with big heart breaths.