Under the purple tongue of morning glory.
A fragment of the trembling thing.

Which I touched. Not knowing how to never die.
Before the chaos there was a moment

of peace: childhood. A ripening.
Compare what I am to what I look like.

Not a daughter. Not a son. But a child still.
I have my moments of hunger. And there's milk.

A stray cat found the abandoned wreck of a god.
Headless black snake with glittering scales.

Xenopeltis. I licked it bruiseless. Tied it around
my little throat. What was to be done after fear?

I am wearing a gender on my neck. I feel
the slow heat of its fitful dying. We know dawn

by the howl of the changeling. Now it is dawn.
I should be young with a small floral knife. Instead

I am holding a good dagger with the blade curved inward.





(The title is Sappho's fragment 122, translated by Anne Carson.)