Wrist Deep

Moored on the shores of consciousness, but loose,
we’ve slipped into this drunken ship together before
where the black sky defies its darkness
like a purring cat stretching its spine over the world;
and the walls take to air like waterfalls
in reverse; where canons of lightning throng
against the sibilant mist and distance cliffs.
We’ve ridden the upward jutting currents, watched stone
birth stone in pillow smoke and slow slither river magma.
We’ve charted existences as they became,
before they were understood un-understood;
places where your skin is salt, your blood frightened eels,
fingernails frail as ice shelves sheering off,
eyelids thin as onion husk. Throats parches as chalk,
this is the edge. This is what I’ve tried to keep you from.

Hallelujah. I named you after praise, watched you grow
warm like the inside of the earth. Your fingers
are magnetic fields of broomstraw I’ve harvested yearly.
How did it come to be that I depend on you so much?
Your roots are nostalgia. I plunge my hands into the soil,
which is you also, somehow. I’ve pulled you,
little weed, and held you against the sun, shadows
telling time across my face and the damp ground.
The sun; the wet, wet ground; the bizarre shaped shadows;
over the years (to me, little sister) you have become these.