I know that sometimes the only truth is the damp of your breath on my neck,

or my root-toes curling around yours.

I'm always trying to make us the same tree.

So I loop my tiny ropes around you.

I am the balloon that bobs and tugs against your wrist.

I'm tethered to your gravity.

My ancestors conjured silken earth into vessels,

Carved themselves into the hearts of trees,

Dipped their gleaming thighs

Into waters made pale by a thousand stars,

Their songs swaying and undulating like a rolling tide.

They planted the seed moon

Into the warm garden-bowl of their hips,

Their bodies rising with it every night

Until it blossomed full and heavy.

My grandmothers called the dancing wind

With ancient words, hushed and hidden and forgotten,

And wove its magic into their veins.

Their hollow bones made love to

the wide, starry sky

Until they crumbled like clay pots,

Walking with bare feet along the kiln.

And when you thread tangled knots into my wings,

I feel their fingertips kissing my throat

And a wild call inside me remembers

I tread with feathered feet over your weathered bones,

Spilling my oceans into their splintered fragments,

Pushing and pulling my moon tides that drown your carefully planted weeds.

I lap over your tangled branches,

Making them smooth as the round belly of a whale -

Pale as sun-bleached sails.

They took all the trees,

Filled our mouths with the rotting roots

As they grated our glittering teeth

To ash and coal.

Their glinting hooks scraped

Angry along our spine,

Each vertebra a thud,

And crushed their boots into

The wet hollows of our bellies.

How, then, could we breathe?

Coffee.

Ah, heart

You doth protest too much

Your skittering and labouring

Only show me

That you want it all the more.