* , a burning haibun

Nine days before my twentieth birthday, hominin workshops aged by half an epoch.  Five hundred and seventy five obsidian hand-axes found in sediment along the Awash River in Ethiopia.  Pleistocene: twelve hundred thousand — dulled blade of 1.2 million — years old.  (Numbers seem smaller the more words I use to name them.)  A word itself is harder to kill because they tend to grow back whole unless cut perfectly between two hearts: then, they hydra, growing heads that don’t remember the one from whose grave they sprouted.  The body is prefix alone; I am guilty of this.  I make that old magick, I *mute, *late, *mogrify my torn heart to obsidian — the next bite out of me will hurt you just as much.  Before we forged obsidian weapons, we had just bones and the flesh to hold them together.  Now even that is not mine.  I wish I’d climbed the other branch at the fork where gendre got their d-ectomy in French (you remove a word’s dick and they lose all sexual connotations.  How could two words have sex without a dick involved, right?), introduce myself as survival horror/mystery/hagiography/memoir.  Instead I *figure myself into a shape you can name morbid.  Every *action the minimum due, the smallest concession that you think will satisfy my hunger.  Rock in my stomach: thank you for that, I needed more iron in my diet anyway, I am running out of blood to consume.  Yes, another death.  Please.  I am *cendant.

//

___.  before my __________ birth ________ i ______

_____.__ found __.____ me ____________ Awash __

___ in ____._ red ________ I ______. name ______  

_________ self _________ to _____ grow back whole 

______________ from _________ a ______ body ____

__________ I am guilty of ______________________.

______________________________________________ 

____. my _____________________________________

_______________  forged _________ weapons ,__

___. and ___ flesh _______ wish I’d ______ end ___

 their _______________. sexual con ______ have _

sex without _____., s _______ h ______.___ e _ /h __

___. e __ r.  In _______ a shape you can name ___

morbid. ______. im  __ due, the smallest ________ 

____________________________. hunger ______ 

_____  in my _______  iron ___ blood ___________.

___________________.  Please.  I _____ end ___.

//

__________ name __________ body ____ guilty _____

____ weapons __ and ______ sex __ co-morbid.  ___

_______ Every _____ small ._ death.  Please.  _____.