To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

but cancer doesn’t give a damn who you trust; it just takes away, eats up a person without giving anything back to the earth. No purpose, no place in the ecosystem—a giver of pain and nothing more. And now she is there in my brain’s forest of tombstones.

There’s danger beneath the false purity of snow. Death in the speared points of icicles and frozen lakes. All of this cold, it never deserved my mother.

My mother and I were alike in many aspects, but her depression was quiet and hidden, softly bubbling beneath her surface. Mine was more active, more vengeful. During these times, I felt more like the daughter of wrath itself rather than my mother’s child.

Can dead flesh hold anger? Mine would. Mine would be the most excruciatingly bitter of them all.

Our deaths deserve no other meaning than to be devoured. Our bodies have ruined the earth, it seems only right such bodies should give back to nature, to the animals. Because then it does not matter if society declares your face or skin or features wrong, we are all bodies waiting to be swallowed into soil, into the ocean.

My girl with nighttime skin and eyes full of starry constellations, what have I done to you?