Salt

By Melissa Broder

How can you go swimming in another human being?
I am swimming and asking for light.
Once I paddled into dust and f*cking
and the horsemen and ruin
and the poisonous hollows of a projected blue eye
and cracked my skull on all and caught more disease
in my already dread mind and entered the medicines
of no human power, the forests of disappearing moans,
which were rich in sap but lacked dissolve
fertilized against my own swimming nature, Aleph
I am swimming for you now and I don’t care.
When you leave the forest you do not become the ocean
and I have become the desert trying to swim in the ocean
and knowing this, carrying the forest floor in a sweet wood coffin
and the blackbrush and rocks, the yucca and cacti of receded oceans,
which were never oceans at all or there would have been shells on the sand,
they only looked like oceans in my thirst, I cut the old horizon
with a sword you have given and I gut the heavens
and bleed their light and swim in that.

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