Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm

Because Yosemite’s high altitude lake’s tadpoles wash up in glow-in-the-dark condoms and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because there’s bird shit in the clouds. Things catch, get caught. Things are consumed. There’s no looking back. And so you were conceived here, Ezekiel, fifty feet off the Trail of Broken Ankles. We wanted to make sure no one would see. The one hiker who saw looked away. Amino acids of the flushed cheek. Dirge for eyeless things. I washed my body in the river and the river went numb— the mind sunburned. I imagine the second before you took, before the cells began to split, before that flint was struck, before the dna began to twist, that a colorless emptiness suddenly inverted and told the world that he, too, once had a mother. But there is no nest of leaves. Nothing stops. The clock in the glacier still ticks above us and on our skin there were enormous ants, the segments of their bodies like black droplets of paint pushed very close against each other but still not touching, yet taking their work with them— taking away their dirt world.