For something old as Ocean,
far back as blood and poetry go, together,
and familiar as the soft flesh back
of my own neck:

I built myself a love note
that tried to kill its ghost writer.
I am hosting something inside me.

Wriggling beneath the soft of my gums,
it holds station within my mouth,
makes nests of my cheeks,
lays eggs which hatch in shreeks.

Today, you are a mountain.
Today, you are sixteen mountains.

It took twenty years—
stuffed until they split, of
dreaming myself catacombed

and nightmaring myself
fifty years from now and still,
and still,
wading into myself afraid of full lungs.
Twenty years of body bleeding, still, then,
as loudly as this twenty year body does

—it took twenty years to
unlearn the burial of my mind, or
my biology,
or
the name from which mine comes.

Today, you ancient adoration,
you glint of sorrow, my own;

You are the stretch
from skin to
magnificent skin, today.

The triumph of our history is
now, not having to detour
around the caves of meat, raw
open mouths
where I tried to climb out.
Those caverns are monuments
to the world in me
that did not fall.

For something old like Ocean,
I am not drowned
though my body is full.

I am not sunken, as I was
never sunken.
I am not bones
in the palm of what ate
their body.

Like Ocean, I no longer
eat my bodies.

By Emma Bleker

Biography:

Emma Bleker is a 21 year old writer currently working for her English degree in Virginia. She has previously been published, or is forthcoming in Electric Cereal, Persephone’s Daughters, Skylark Review, Rising Phoenix Press, and Cahoodaloodaling, among others. She probably wants to be your friend.