Its way to bend, move, pull, throttle. The line between you is distinct and invisible. It is sun, star, moon and flesh. Your eyes don’t stop seeing when they close. All you see is eyelids, warm and twitching. It could be an angel. Eyes upon eyes upon nails through fingers. A stigmata speckled along and yet holeless. It sounds and forms shape and drips onomatopoeia. “Tears,” you think. They aren’t. It can’t communicate with you like you cannot with your children. You have accepted and excepted your place in this world. What are you? A man. What is this object, but you? Yet, not you, as it is yonic and phallic in a way of intercourse. Forever shoving its shaft through its heart. Longinus and Jesus made one; together inseminating false idols. It makes you rip off your own cock. Slamming it into the ground. The hens die next to it. You weren’t supposed to see this like you weren’t supposed to know you’re a man. Well, once a man. Now, you are a eunuch standing next to a shape and fig tree sapling. The object stares back. Or you think it stares back; but, it’s not. Any face you find reflected is your own. Organs spill out of you. Now lying on the ground is your meat, muscles, and brain shambling away from your skin and bone. You know the object is watching you. Your blood is merging with its ichor. In this moment, you can understand it. Your heart races up the grown tree. You slither towards the top. You smash your brain against the branch; burying the fig. It makes you convulse into the shape of a crash. You, the newest bearer of the first sin, fall and die. Your skin and bones get up with new insides grown. Looking down at you, who is fully formed in rebirth. He says words that feel worse than goodbye and vanishes where the creature was. Everything is now you and you aren’t sure how to tell everything who you are. But you are alive.

Azalea Geist (she/they) is a collector of words, an appreciator of bones, and the only member of her family to her knowledge to win a spelling bee with only one contestant.