A heaviness I knew only in those times, when I used to wind up and pitch myself at birdworld, sunworld, skyworld. Sky I was so thirsty for, I drank sips of her every hour, but no matter how desperate I flung my weight at her, how determined I was to hang in her night-long as a star, sky slapped me back down in an instant.

Now: I stone-sink, anchor-drop, a gore-slab pushed trenchward with the force of a ship shove. Falling indigo-spun, hagfish-tinseled, skirted in scale. Last light unravels fine as jellyfish tentacles, bluing my bared bone.

Once I was a guzzle-gulper, a god-gullet. A sea-sieve, a tsunami-strainer. Volcano-backed, intestines lava tube wide, stomach a cathedral, tongue a mountain in my maw.

I, the unswallowable, sliding slow down a Mariana throat, a metropolis of mouths.

Here, where I am snail-polished, eel-inhaled, lobster-licked to skeleton.

Here, where octopuses yarn their arms through the loom of my ribcage.

In this belly-dark, inked as an oil spill, I am planted with stars. Sequined in supercluster, constellated in snot-flowers, zombie-wormed until I am more hollow than core.

These sorts of touches I once knew: Nuzzle-nudges. Silver Bank kisses. Daughter dorsal-digs. Shrimp-tickles against my oral scoop. Sisters scraping barnacle to barnacle.

But this: a closeness I could not have dreamed in my one-eyed sleep, a thrust deeper than fucking, this glowgarden of bone-eaters rooting in my marrow like kelp.

Scattered like sun through the prism of the sea’s skin. Tossed like coral-spawn confetti. I live in this crab-scuttle, this wing-whip, this shark-shit.

See me there, stuck between mermaid molars.

There, through the glassy shell of a plankton.

See me surfing the cold seep. Slung on a sandbar. Slurped to the silicate center of the earth.

A relief, this stomachlessness. I think I have been this way before. Unblooded. Unstitched. Before and before and before.