You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes
				of blood vessels and tendons, you walk inside
				yourself and eat weather
									Gretel Ehrlich

When I was young, I was a comet 
with an unending shimmering tail,
and I flew over the brokenness below 
that was my life. I didn’t know until I was
twelve that we carry other bodies inside us.
Not babies, but bodies of blood 
that speak to us in plutonic languages 
of pith and serum. When I was
six, there was a man in the woods,
naked. I didn’t know him, but I knew
he was a wrong kind of man/so I ran. 
With my inside body I see his skinny
white bones and curled mouth, he looks
like sickness and it’s the body inside me
that’s running, my red sugar body
that shows me the brutal road to love, 
the one good man, the one song
I can keep as mine. I heard it once 
when I was waitressing, something
made me turn my head, made me
swivel to look at a woman across 
the room, wasn’t even my station, 
but the red sugar said, go. When I
saw her up close, I knew she was 
blood. I can’t explain this—I only met 
my mother once. I said, Do you know 
a woman named Dorothy? Her face 
was pale, she said, No—in that hard way.
Maybe her red sugar told her to run—
but before she left, she grabbed my arm,
said, I did have a sister named Dorothy, 
but she died. Two inches away from her
dyed blond hair, I said, okay, but both 
our inside bodies knew she was lying. 
Some people call it eating weather—
the way you swallow what you know,
but keep it—later it rises like a storm 
from another world, reptilian and hungry.  
It’s the thickness that drives us and 
stains us, the not asking/just coming/
the cunt alive and jewel-like/the uncut 
garnet and the lava flow/it’s barbarism/
bloodletting/the most liquid part of us/ 
spilling/spreading/the granular red sea 
of sap and gore/sinking/moving forward 
at the same time/slippery/red
containing blue/it’s the sweet,
deep inside of the body.						

Listen to a reading of the poem.