Link Analysis

 

They say my aunt Kathleen planted the placenta my brother was born from under a pine tree in Cape Cod. I don’t know if this is true. On the center of that property an autumn olive bush crowds the sun porch. Finches feast on its red berries. Berries that erupt like fish roe between your fingers. And at night, the popping embers in the fireplace. And elsewhere, stepped-on ladybugs crush like kernels.

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My sister and her two kids dress up as kangaroos for Halloween. The two-year-old walks, the eight month old stays bundled to his mother’s chest. I think she would keep them in pouches if she could, stacked inside of her like matryoshkas.

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I was born two weeks late. Breech—wanted to keep swimming, keep womb. Now, if I tried to reinhabit my mother, there’d be no room. Uterine polyps like a hoarder’s living room. Lithium, albuterol, prednisone polluting the waters. How could I breathe if she has a towel draped over her head, head bent over a bowl of kettle water, directing steam in a long wheeze to stubborn lungs?

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People step on small objects and unknowingly take them in. I’ve heard of a woman who housed a nail in her heel for thirty years. A callous closed door. Playing “One Truth, One Lie” I tell a class: 1.) A cherry pit’s been stuck in a small hole in my esophagus since I was thirteen 2.) Two of my houses caught fire. Amazing what people choose to believe when forced to pick between two extremes. The girl to my left, I’ve eaten a goat heart. I’ve eaten shark. I close all interior doors when leaving my house now—slows the fire from spreading.

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Lorca writes, Like a snake, my heart / has shed its skin. / I hold it here in my hand, / full of honey and wounds. The skin like the inner sheath of a beet, a thing that slips and stains. Or is it a dried out afterthought—the sentence only uttered in the head, the one that never actually audibly existed. Snakes shed their skin between every two weeks and two months, depending on their growth rate. Is it the heart that swells that comes to shed? Producing honey to feed the new face in the room. The sweet addiction of simple sugars.

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I knew she’d eaten the shark because I ate it too this summer. Black tips caught offshore—how long and guilt-heavy the filets were as I washed them to freeze. And I keep picturing that goat heart. Small like the fist of a developing fetus, a cherry pit, a shallot, the last solid stacking doll. At an orphanage in Ethiopia a boy named Bekalu walked a goat around the yard on a short rope. Another boy recorded it’s braying with a plastic toy with large buttons. That night the cook slit the goat’s throat over the sewer drain. I didn’t ask what they did with its heart, just washed my hands in the yard sink with thirty plus kids and sat down to eat.

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What happens to a planted heart? My mother sends me an amaryllis bulb for a birthday. A green stalk grows like lightning, flowers red like a punch, falls apart. I keep it for years. When removed from its pot my fingers stumble on a nest. More than ten baby bulbs cluster in the roots. I think of chains of organ donors and distribute them to friends. There are always things moving beneath still earth.

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Consider the beetroot. A squid of a vegetable, housing all that ink. Roasted, I peel the skins off in the sink, fingering the purple muscle, weighing its ounces in my hands, absorbing its stain among overgrown cuticles. Eaten, the red infiltrates, the betanin not breaking down in the body. Blushes the toilet water. But before all this: they huddle in brown skins in more brown earth. Cool and rough, keeping their color secret.

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Underground, these colors don’t exist without light: flesh of afterbirth; anti-flesh of tumors; various reds of hearts, cherries, and the hot growth promise of a bloom; the coral throat of sharks.

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At an aquarium a seven-foot female sand tiger shark eats a five-foot male shark. She swims slowly around the tank with half of his body hanging out of her mouth. Over the next twenty-one hours she continues to ingest the body until only the tip of his tail remains in view. The aquarium says they’ll stay this way for the next four or five days, until she regurgitates the carcass, unable to fully digest him. I wonder how he died. Did she snap his neck on attack? Or did he survive the swallow and lay flaring his gills against her stomach lining?

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My sister birthed her first child naturally and planned to do the same for the second. Her contractions came on slow for the first twenty-four hours. I’d fallen asleep on the small couch in the corner of her hospital room, letting her husband hold on to her as she rocked out a pattern to breathe through. I woke up to moans so low and guttural I expected a different version of mammal—one crouched on four legs, matted fur, lacking corneas. Or a tribe of goats to slaughter. She begged for an epidural from the shower floor. An hour later they cut that baby out of her.

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A shark heart contains two chambers. Continuous movement keeps their blood pressure up, keeps them alive. Snake hearts have three chambers and can move around, owing to their lack of diaphragms. They swallow large prey; the heart adjusts its position. The human heart, of course, has four. Other fours: seasons, table legs, human limbs, the classical elements. My two siblings, plus me, plus my mother. There is no meaning behind these numbers. Think of them as links. Now think of links vs. lynx and notice where you are compared to where you were.

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We spend much of our lives trying to be contained. To have and to hold. We hide in closets, under beds, in bushes and dryers. Seek out treehouses, forts, deep holes in the sand. The inches of pool water between the ladder and the wall. I spent hours of my childhood in our attic fingering through boxes of National Geographic. We take long showers, held by water, long baths—close the curtain to seal ourselves in. We lay in tanning booths, pushing the twenty-minute limit, wanting to stay encased in all that heat and light.

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In a high mountain pass in the Swiss Alps a weather phenomenon called the Maloja Snake occurs when warm air rises up the slopes of the Maloja Pass and transforms into low lying clouds. The clouds pass down the winding river, resembling a serpent on the move. Could you call them caught clouds? A valley-stuck piece of sky. Or did they lay down voluntarily to be cradled for a morning?

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I held my baby teeth in my gums for 5 to 12 years. Twenty small, pink holes for my tongue to find rest. Each lost tooth placed in a metal tin the size of a matchbook. Now a maraca to invoke a childhood long passed.

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I hold you like a hole holds light (Maria Hummel). Perhaps empty is something to be collected. Something to throw sand across to reveal a camouflaged bridge. Void: completely empty. Devoid: entirely lacking. The prefix de, often used to indicate negation and reversal, fails to do so here. Emptiness doubles. Have we canceled or intensified the negation? (Insert black hole metaphor).

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Imagine a tree disappears every time you say the word. The lullaby my mother sang me as she rubbed the growing pains out of my young calves and forearms contained one word: tree. Tree tree tree. Tree tree tree. Tree tree tree tree tree tree tree. A lilting, repetitive melody. Twenty minutes and she’d culled a forest. Gaping holes where the roots had been. She takes the ache out of my muscles, holds it in her hands like a surgeon palms an organ, and places it in the dirt.

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We’re born from bodies, put things in our bodies, eat other bodies. Some of us eat bodies identical to our own. (The word for this means savage.) At end, bodies are laid in the earth. A hole is dug, then refilled.