Her baby half-moon eyes slid open for the first time amidst a certain, perforated darkness. Nestled between the rotting skeleton of a tilted circus caravan
and the oil-greased rungs of the town-end’s snaking railroad track,
She was bathed slick in moonlight and milk
Like a cow-child,
Grazing animal
of the sky.
Already, her birth was a sideways-secret birth,
Knelt on the outskirts of the grounds,
Weeping of a lingering want
to hold this moment briefly, like thread between forefinger and thumb:
The wish of a woman promised to doom—
A recklessly corporeal desire
Even before the mother-madness ever broke loose.
When the child opened her eyes, she saw not the stars, but the absences of light between the splintering pinprick holes in wood and fabric of a sideways-tented shanty, pitched in the wretchedness of inconversance and reeking of tragic dispossession.
In those first moments of her newly minted heartbeat, a fisting and unfisting of pulse, she spread her jaws wide to form the first notes of hunger, and was given a bit: ironclad and fashioned tightly for her infant mouth. In the flesh of each of her palms grew then, the stamps of many soil-smeared, contemptuous crescent moons: meeting of outgrown baby fingernail, sharp and like a needle, and her own pulpous, rounding flesh.
It was a dirtborn christening. One that slid her into the world like a piano key falling into coffin-hammered sound. One that made them forever sing that she was birthed of the mud.
***
Each morning on the fairgrounds is stretched wide and chokingly thin, a sheen of mist rolling over the ash-grey knolls and sifting between creaking structures of This One World Faire Spectaculaire. It drifts up caves of drooping wagon-backs that look like sagging gaping mouths and flits under pinstripe flags framing the ironwrought entry gates,
curly-lettered script with pictures of an inverted human being. His knobby ankles at the ears and elbows jutting out, like a bubbling up of something thronging at the inside.
The waking call pierces stillness amongst the shanty-tents of the Wax-skin dwellings, and glides between the Crewmen’s mounted caravans. The call is low and long, rang by Crew Manager at the center of the grounds, by pulling at the vocal cords of a once-been Wax-skin, his body twisted into a cowhorn that still bears the aching tenor of a dormant despair.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤThe grounds begin to move with the sweep of people, mealworm-bodies overlapping each other, whips and lashes ringing, the scrape of iron shackle and the creak and groan of pulling cargo by the jaw,
lifting tentpoles tall enough to pierce the sky between the wrinkled shoulderblades,
pitching tents on hands and knees, sailing rope knotted round the stomach.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤCrewmen of laughs that sound like guns with their coats and leather shoes hop-skip down the stairs of their dwellings and descend upon the rows of poorly-pitched tents like an army of clocks, crosses, and latent ammunition. The demanding chant of their arrival is work, mold, bend, hold:
A stretching of the Wax-skin, skull to toe-joints, a glint of hunger in the Crewman’s eye like a child’s glee, for they have learnt to make dripping clay and shining specimen out of beating human beings.
***
There is that girl within the fairgrounds, divot of energy amongst the boiled-shirt, starched petticoat-fairgoers, not just because of the shackles round her wrists and feet like iron bangles,
But for the pooling melancholy
That she keeps,
And the anxious sweat she draws
from Fairmaster pores. He hungers for the gravity she holds, served plump and roasted crisp, her steadfastness a thinly-sliced prosciutto, her essence exquisite on his dinner plate.
He salivates at a roasted peacock of her body in a thick
meat pie.
This girl was born of threatening conditions. It was the night of her birth that her mother broke her way like a demon, a Wax-skin voice had carried the story through the grounds to reach her pining abalone shell-ears,
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ— dear child of open night air, your mother made her final break from us with you in her arms, touching
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤyou like we had been forever bound from, crushing you into
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤher breast and feral at the Crewmen as they crested the sightline, knowing they came to
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤtake you from her grasp. She was wailing in a strange tongue like twisted tearing howls
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤof a rabid dog, and they beat her as such, but we could never clear the ringing sounds
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤfrom our heads. Tortured moans of pain and bubbling blood but they made our souls long
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤfor language, to speak and to remember our names. Her wails sounded like saltened sea
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤand bending limbs of the banyan tree all at once and you, when we look at you, you smell
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤof sun-baked seabanks, look like marshy cycles of bud to branch to root, open air to into
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤwater to soil again like the crawling spirit of our very souls and the fading echoes of
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤsomething we have long forgotten. dear child of the moon, know that your coming into
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤthese grounds was different, you lived, you looked towards the sky, your mother was a
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤdog and lashing at her chain for you, you felt touch before you could know what it ever
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤmeant.
—
And it was this closeness to the human subjectivity,
That made her necessary for a Fairmaster meal—meat pie of the body of a Wax-skin girl, born too close to an eclipsing sun, and swathed in unruly defiance.
***
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤOn a night of black so dark it bled purple at the edges of her vision, the girl of thrashing mother-mettle and half-moon scars upon her palms wandered to the fairground’s House of Mirrors, large and looming the moonlight. Nipping night wind marked the coming of the August Harvest—Fairmaster’s feast; his cruel devouring.
She stepped inside.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤAll at once a girl of mind and soil was in a room of headspace, miles and miles of body for her eyes to bounce between, and immediately she lurched forward. A reeling bout of bile formed at her lips, an ache pressing at her temples. When she righted herself, she saw the wincing craters on her face and realized as she gazed into pits of her own eyes, she could not focus on any part of her physical body. Like winding snakes and teeming worms she looked like parts of a whole, smoke shifting, curling, dripping at the hard-bound edges of her form.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤTracing to her gut, her eyes found a beating pulse spreading gradually throughout her chest, into her throat and wrists and ear canals. She was beating inside-out and outside-in and she wanted to wail and cry at the sensation, because she was cyclical, endless, and breathing as a porous, sponging thing.
Before her eyes, her abdomen zipped open like a seedpod, and her guts and blood and flesh bloomed out of her all at once like a spinning wheel and she nearly, nearly, cried. She knew then, there was too much within her, two tongues between her teeth and a universe inside her throat. She was too much, too big, too full, too many, and she felt her eyes split further open and her pulse rock the earth beneath her feet at the bullseye of her body-hurricane.
This is why she must be put to rest, she thought, she must be eaten and ground to paste and spat out and pressed deep into the soil to become a catalogued, bookmarked, measured fossil of this strange creature, footnote in history and marked by extinction.
How can someone as Many as her exist in this monocultural world of the triumphant One built on death of the other? Of the single God and lord almighty,
the two straight hands of a clock binding breaths to coins to lashes of a whip, the up and the down, the left and the right in converging stakes of that looming pale cross. The White and dirtborn worming not, the good and the illegitimate, disappearing evil. That single moon stretched across the night sky, and the paling sun that bakes humans into cattle.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤShe resolved that this must be her end, and the end of her people. There was no room for them in this world. There was nothing left but to be consumed.
***
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ— dear child of the open night air, we know this is not how your story concludes.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤYou were born of a bodily, earthly cling, the beating between a mother and child and the
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤscraping of the fresh, decaying soil beneath your fingertips. We always knew that in your
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤmouth you house celestial multitudes. You house us inside your heart and ooze out our
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤbeating breaths with every second you remain alive. We know that it was dormant power
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤwithin that was too much to hold under shackles and poison-smoke within the body of a
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤlittle girl, but that needed, and craved for the chance to burst ever through.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤAnd when He came to eat you, we watched with knowing pounding through our hearts
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤthat it was His doom and not ours. It was when He tried to take you in his throat,
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤstretching His form as He forced unto us for so very long, and just after you seemed to
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤdisappear, came the sudden beat of mounting breath, and you came forth.
Your body could not fit within the column of His throat, you were big as a galaxy and you
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤstuck your thumb out through his eye-socket and
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤburst your voice for the first time through the open chasm of His mouth like a black-box lamp shining through.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤThe sound of your cry and the call that echoed through his pallid inability to stomach your fullness, woke us up. It was your mother, our mothers, our infants, our siblings, the bones and stretched-out, glazed-over skins left abandoned in the making of our cages; and all at once we were reborn in the light of a thousand suns and five hundred burning moons. We take each other in through spinning, growing, dying, and drifting,
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤa cyclical transformation. We speed into the weavings of our memories and consciousness. We know not of this clamped-down “liberty” like the shackles pressed upon our ankles and muzzles upon our mouths,
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤbut of liberation, our sharing and making and birthing of our multitudes. A landscape for our soaring free and resting down upon the earth, burrowing within her and springing forth again. You, child of these moons, the unguarded night, and soil caked beneath the fingernails, are eternal and
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤindestructibly ours.