\n<\/p>\n
Widened, a white pupil
over the yard, as my grandmother
hung rattlesnake skins.<\/p>\n
Her fingertips worked
in the quiet grammar of ceremony.<\/p>\n
I remember the scent first:
drying pepper, faint venom,
the sap-sweet musk of cedar;<\/p>\n
a blend that lived in her clothes
and followed her through the house.<\/p>\n
Sometimes she hummed,
barely audible.
Sometimes she worked in silence,<\/p>\n
the kind that makes you look inward
for a place to put your eyes.<\/p>\n
And beneath that broad-mouthed moon,
I began to see:
These were not tasks,<\/p>\n
but continuances.
I stand behind her,<\/p>\n
barefoot on cool planks,
feeling the night
reach its long fingers<\/p>\n
between us.
She does not turn,<\/p>\n
but I know she senses me
the way a tree knows a bird
has landed in its crown.<\/p>\n
When morning finally comes\u2014
thin, ash-coloured,<\/p>\n
soft with the promise of heat,
she gathers what has dried enough
to hold its shape<\/p>\n
and leaves the rest
for another moon.<\/p>\n
The carapace,
the echo of bone learning its purpose,
the long solitude of a creature
that carries its house like a wound.<\/p>\n
They say all vertebrate embryos
begin the same. Yet, only mine
lets the shoulder blades wander,
sliding inward like hesitant rivers
before the ribs bend and fold\u2014
hardening into a wall
of absence, of restraint.<\/p>\n
For years, I thought it was a shell.<\/p>\n
Only later did I understand
it is the negative space,
the hollow the bones refused to fill,
that kept me alive.<\/p>\n
Why the body waits so long
to learn its own design\u2014<\/p>\n
I cannot answer.
I was made for enduring, not explaining.<\/p>\n
Everything I know comes from pressure:
the deep, unlit hours when water
feels like origin,
and the world above is merely rumour.<\/p>\n
I hear it
as a kindred thing, an old riddle
moving through the sea\u2019s spine,
searching for a listener.<\/p>\n
A patient creature, I continue
in slow armour of questions,
swimming the seam
between what the body reveals
and what it refuses to say.<\/p>\n
The shell is never mine alone:
It is shaped by absence,
by what will not become flesh.<\/p>\n
I am built for endurance,
for an unrecorded life,
for the quiet economies of survival.<\/p>\n
Every movement a negotiation,
a testament
that nothing soft
ever vanishes entirely.<\/p>\n
Sweet olive ghosts in,
barely a scent;
just a suggestion,
a warm, narcotic vapor.<\/p>\n
Feral and unguarded,
unmasked, startled
by our hunger, held
in the amber resin of now.<\/p>\n
Somehow your skeletal
denim loosens, drops
to the floorboards, and
we turn wholly to pillows,<\/p>\n
facing each other like
two starving jackals
tracking the moon\u2019s
blue cartilage. Joy\u2014clean,<\/p>\n
sudden\u2014flares through us,
a bright, ragged surge
moving through the body:
animal, involuntary,<\/p>\n
a sound we cannot stop,
a place where everything
is possible, where nothing
has yet been named. And so
we make love again,<\/p>\n
as if the world had
fallen to embers,<\/p>\n
as if it were only
a small shelter rising
in the dark, built
moment by moment.<\/p>\n
\u00abRELATED READ\u00bb<\/strong> POEMS BY CAROLYN CHILTON CASAS: Essential Language, Metaphorically Speaking and more\u00bb<\/strong><\/p>\n image: Stine86Engel<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Sturgeon Moon Widened, a white pupilover the yard, as my grandmotherhung rattlesnake skins. Her fingertips workedin the quiet grammar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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