what our bodies choose to remember,   
the circling, the backtracking
of a mind in reel, 
a narrative turning in your guts,  
a hissing and grunting  
vocabulary of wounds  
that collapse in on themselves.  

The heart refuses to  
linger on  
what you lug around  
tucked and folded,  
a language of gaps  
rolled between thumb and index finger
like a bead of unsayable plosives,
both lament and howl.

Take me to the edge of  
the night thick with grief,
through the door of noise,
echoes of lives passing through
a constellation of absence.
In the silvery, mutinous light of loss,
I am fed best by what is left behind.

Sometimes against one’s will,  
a oneness of meaning creeps in—
roots tendril inside a body
to hold the weight of your own frame,
a sequence of continuation  
inscribing new divinations of being.

The body pushes out deep splinters,
the tender and violent untangling,
a birth born out of wonder into wonder,  
a worn place ready to receive  
her back into herself.  

Dig into the moment,  
charged and layered,  
the blue flame of an egg,
a whisper of a nest,
the cool mossy relief.  

~  A cento created from lines and phrases of Felicia Zamora’s poetry collection, Interstitial Archeology, and Lia Purpura’s essay collection, Rough Likeness