To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

suggests that there is no other purpose for our deaths other than to become sustenance for something else.

The birds are there, nestled inside my mind’s tombstone labyrinth, and they stare at me from atop my families’ gravestones.

What does it taste like—dead flesh? Do the bodies haunt the vultures after they consume the carcass? If I eat a human’s meat, do they live on inside me forever?

Our deaths deserve no other meaning than to be devoured.

I am the daughter of wrath, and to wrath I shall return.