Heather Lang-Cassera

x. 

The number 10 is a window of multitudes, an ecosystem of decimal, a lung collapsed and re-opened. If close enough, even a speck of dust would eclipse the moon. A breath, pressed, as purple-mountain petals, exhales in all directions. These once-broken bones are now stunted coral, a static code as staccato as the sting of unworried sea nettle. Before scales hollow the sunlight, mouths burst into sacrament. Vertebrae turn into honeycomb. The low sky of a lost alphabet, your heart sketches its own diagram for every missed opportunity. Love is a fetal memory for what we cannot understand, kept cradled in the curl of each of our empty fingers, every unit of sound. Only this I know for certain: morning will be the wildfire at the foot of our bed. We cannot be the radial symmetry of the starfish, nor of fruit, nor of fossil.

— Heather Lang-Cassera