honey & lime

When the Arcana Isn’t Enough  

As a child, I fell into the ground & 

my blood mixed with dust. Instead  

of renaming myself phoenix, I claimed the ash. A theorem 

of absolution states if I then swallowed a fever, 

now it must exorcise itself from my body. Something I call 

my own slicked earth. The kicker is, my own womb is hostile when I 

was borne from a cathedral. In other words, my mother’s DNA

 

painstakingly stitched within my own becomes paths I’m

predestined to follow. We both swell up & pretend to be 

unafraid in the face of danger. Then, we both watch as disease 

follows roadmaps & how it always chooses me

over her. Legend has it, I am an empty

orchestra, an internal world echoing silence. I imagine a 

posthumous excavation of my uterine tissue &

 

archaeologists discovering unstrung violins. There’s

no word for the fear of inheritance, but I am terrified

of how illness is generational but only 

chooses me. For example, my heart

has always smothered under the weight of truths 

I can’t tell are real. Last year I sat on the wooden floor &

traced back my genealogy to the 600s. Every single legend

 

ends in death. We are a history of fallen kingdoms & 

plundered lands: both intentioned to unearth fresh soil. If 

I ever plant seeds, that ground is scientifically promised to

be uncertain. My mother holds me in every hospital bed &

strokes her hands cool against my skin, while I try to remember 

why I chose earth over fire. I’ve spent my whole life

in elegiac divinity, praying on omens 

 

that always turn bad. Every spring, I watch my mother

blossom over into herself, her muscles lithe & sprawling. 

When I was a child, I dreamt about climbing inside 

of her chest & sharpening myself on her fortified

ribcage. Something to keep the growth in. Something

to keep the sickness out. I think of our bloodline & 

terror of the way 

 

my children are all a potential hypothetical. The way 

the doctors count my fallibilities on my own mottled

fingertips. The way I sat inside my mother’s lap

& learned muscle memory. The way she holds me still

like I’m nothing but holy, even as my body is apocalyptic. 

The way I cannot want for children because they’re 

statistically predispositioned to hurt like me. In every dream, I

 

stare at the ceiling. I astral project into a timeline

where my daughter does not inherit my sickness 

& every seed she plants flowers upwards. When the arcana isn’t enough, 

I reinvent all the stories & cartograph an alternate path 

to arcadia. Something that belongs to the potentially barren. 

A wilderness that takes the destruction & 

turns it into a rebirth.