sunset after bush fire ︎ It’s three pm and the fire sun is a neon-blood, hollow hole in the sky. We are all younger than we are now. My mother’s children are running inside her body, her body bloating to make space, to hold us...and I am holding her tightly (Venus:white Goddess, celestial body, of Willendorf) as her body mutates: stomach and pelvis widening, collapsing, becoming convex. Our bod(ies) are a perverted meme, reveling in their ability to copy themselves into more and more curdled forms, into prostheses (half god, half robot). Reproduction as an experiment in the hyperfemme, bloating to achieve roundness, (or an impeccable smoothness) bloat, squish, hollow hole, becoming. I am holding and we are shaking and we are becoming no longer a body...we are becoming hollow, plastic-flesh-carcass falling to the ground like cloth. Out from within us (the mush) grows a droopy neck blossom head, overflowing with seed. ︎ I am no longer engulfed but adjacent, watching our body become earth. Cyborg lover reads me a poem they found from the year I was born, “We were too Black for the earth (too gory perhaps). There’s not going to be anything left. Afterwords is one big funeral, clumps of bodies bound together in black, half faces, sitting together.I will/won’t stop fighting, running until breath feels like a dim rush. We will find Love and hold onto it’s swollen slippery surface until it bursts.” We are sitting in the strange amber glow of the fire-sun, heat-wave afternoon, my hand is in yours and yours and yours, squeezing tightly. Some of us are singing, & some of us are hydrating & most of us are thinking about our afterwords.