By the longest river of Babylon, I was born and nursed,
my mother's breasts engorged and heavy with the sorrow
of widows though she never married. Her face was a long wail.
I grew fat from the milk of her suffering, my own face a sunspot,
a dark region on the surface of her dreams. Her mood changed
with the phases of the moon. Time did not once halt his siege
of her body—relentless, inevitable, immutable. Her body,
full of such terrible light, betrayed her every time, unfailingly.
Her mouth became a sea of blood, Plutonian. She martyred
my language. She taught me early the lilting dialect of ache,
her tongue a slab of stone, unmalleable. She sculpted me out
of clay and placed me delicately, a sin offering, effigy of her longing,
simulacrum of her shame, upon the upturned palm of agony, my body
prostrating, a beggar at the gates of paradise, asking to be let inside.
