Earth Prayer
For just a little while,
un-imagine the outline of your body.
Who drew that?
Erase it gently.
Your skin wasn't sketched
with a fine-tipped pen.
It erupted from erotic non-binary pollen
inebriating suns with such far fire
their fragrance of holy astonishment
just now caresses your basal cells.
There's one solution to this disease:
melt your frozen chest.
The sickness is having edges.
Let your vestigial fur be a desert of sage
where species long extinct still roam, nest,
have babies in your sebaceous pores.
Let your bones be mountains and hills
hidden in the mist of the microbiome,
your veins and arteries rivers and streams
transporting barges of
exotic psychotropic
herbs and orca-painted war canoes.
The insect kingdom buzzes through your diaphragm
cross-fertilizing forests in your alveoli.
All possible genders frolic through your hollows.
Your breath is the sky.
Each proton of you sparkles with a distant star,
each cell of you a hologram
steaming with the musk of possibility,
seraphim tangled in the algebraic chaos
of your afterbirth.
You say you are awake, but do you even know
that night and day are balanced on your fontanel,
the moon in your loins as you grasp
between your toes the mud of ancestors?
What is the biosphere made of? Names.
Names woven of quieter Names.
Names of fungi, crustacean names,
names of protozoan gods and unicellular angels.
Your marrow remembers them all
when your coccyx hums with the breath of the mother.
Give suck. Relieve her
teat.
Become the powerful warrior
who slumbers at the breast.
Let all twelve planets circle your heart
like a clock with no hands.
One inhalation, eternity.
One sip, a miracle of fire.
Now breathe out and say, "enough,"
as you might murmur a prayer.
Listen to ripples of "aah,"
the incomplete Ameen
that your atrium mutters to its ventricle.
Lost in that sound is your own name,
which cannot be spoken
because the work of singing the world
is never over.
Chalk mandala by high school biology teacher Caryn Babaian
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