To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

Freedom is all I want, to shift my spine and shoulder blades like tectonic plates and grow wings instead.

The carrion birds are survivors; they’ll outlast us all, thriving long after any apocalypse. Envy sends a hot jolt through my stomach for both the birds and their dead meals. The body is never wrong for them. They devour it. They just eat. They are ugly, and I cannot blame them for this, cannot fault their design the way society faults mine, faults us all.

She was the last person I really trusted, the last person who felt like family besides Luna, 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

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?

I have been tying the quilled ends of the feathers together with curled, black strands, admiring how they glisten in the winter’s seldom sunlight. When the project is finished, I will have my own wings and fly with the great vultures and watch the world from above, waiting for life to die, to rot, to sustain me long after the living vermin of the earth are gone.

Luna-bug, my moonlight girl, keep screaming inside those wind chimes. I will find you and take you with me.

Luna, my love song, my tiger in the forest. I want to apologize. I want to swallow you whole.

I found what I wanted and needed, though the vultures still orbit above like unobtainable black stars. Beautiful and from another world. I should have known better. I found my freedom even if it comes at the cost of such a suffocating, vehement end. But at least it is my ending, my bitter devouring. At least it is something they cannot take from me.