Excerpt from Green & Grey

1

A line

like the seam along the body of a plastic doll divides us into hemispheres

A left

and a right Nose

cleft

lips and chin

She is a mathematician

a Gardner of clouds

making shapes

from ethereal things

and witnessing through electric appendages

It is the flavor

of treble and the size of white noise bleeding out across the horizon

she tells me

There are wrinkles in the planet’s surface tides like the tiny crests

on the crust of a cabbage

Microbial worlds of sentience silent in the ephemera

between here and my fingertips

She stands divided Between the world And what she calls it

I straddle

one foot on the ground

and the other not a foot at all

Calling out across a continent a voice traversing miles of empty air

arriving as an echo

New and tired a mother tends to her young

the flesh

looks upon its guest and says

You are divided You are silent

Your voice reverberates past the clouds through the mitochondria

past nebulas and dendrites

and into warm hands

kneading cool earth

Pushing seeds across the seam

continuing this lucid conversation spoken in code

The roots reach deep like synapses or the tendrils of a river

down through the soil

towards a neighbor’s embrace

Dividing in two

Spreading identity through mimesis

I look into the mirror and see the place where our hemispheres join

I feel my skin

which keeps me encased lets me know the difference between hot and cold inside and out

world and earth

Skin is the origin

The story was infinite disembodied impersonal

not a story at all

as it rained down from some celestial rock prokaryotic and discrete

No sense of self

to distract from the crack in

the temple’s ceiling

The moment when the avalanche is over you

the tsunami cresting

lightning lifting from the static beneath your feet

the sublimity of consciousness slipping away in old age even the face of your child

unfamiliar

The seam is where it comes together where it breaks apart

where the inanimate becomes conscious where morals meet violence

where gender fails

and where the light

however dim

breaks through and powers each word each seed

each conscious moment towards its empty palace