Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda

Her mind felt like a boat filling up with water, but the sinking could be a new mindset.

“Divine chaos devours human order,” she told them. “Living nature devours dead nature,”

“We aren’t going to adopt this place, we’re going to be part of its neglect,”

She talked to herself because she wanted to, and even though it wasn’t part of her therapy, she had discovered that there was someone more scurrilous inhabiting her body and sharing her thoughts; a girl who was her and, at the same time, wasn’t.

ruptures in time that made them feel strangely on fire.

everyone engenders their murderers, she thought, but only women give birth to them—a death she carried like a seed in her profession, her hairstyle, the way she dressed, even her gestures, but not in her beliefs or her way of speaking.

she never asked “Why are you my shadow?” nor did she confess that it scared her to see herself in another, a damaged reflection or doppelgänger about to disappear so her double could exist.

Education, she’d had to learn right away, was a matter of strength.

“No one likes to say it, Becerra, but the education system is made for lion tamers, not teachers,”

Clara understood the kind of happiness fed by the disgrace of those around you.

Because education, she had learned very quickly, was a matter of status,

“The soul is the prison of the body,”

“True humiliation only exists in the flesh,”

“Lacan was right when he said truth is always structured as fiction,”

Poverty was ugly, and they loved beauty.

The sublime: the vertigo of what’s unexplored, that drive toward sensations that launched her desire into the darkness.

how the people closest to you can be complete strangers.

“Because white is the perfect silence,” Annelise responded with apparent solemnity. “And God is the horrible silence of everything.”

because it was better to set your feet on the cement of verbal logic than lie naked in the ocean of your own mind.

“Poetry is an attempt to create the experience of the unsayable,”

The affirmation of all that is human in the haze, while on the other side, animals hunt.

A panic attack is like burning up in water, falling upward, freezing in a fire, walking against yourself, your flesh solid and your bones liquid,

“There is nothing more sublime than a mountain that burns,”

“It seems impossible, Becerra, that hell lies beyond these glaciers.”

After all, walking toward life required the same strength as walking toward death: the same courage, the same broken nails.

“Because my God is a hysterical wandering womb.”

“Sometimes I like to imagine that the universe is God’s corpse decomposing,”

But the landscape is always a potential predator,

The body was the only reality for a mind that fed on deserts, but hers couldn’t offer anything more than that world of unbearable sensations and the vengefulness that concealed her ultimate desire.

And there are moments when Anne seems possessed by the things she makes up.

To be hungry was to accommodate the nothing and listen to it regurgitating amphibians in your stomach.

the story of siblinghood begins with a murder,

“Daughters cannibalize their mothers, Becerra, milk to bone.”

Only a mother tells the truth. Monsters have to be taught how to be good daughters.

Mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb / I open myself to thee / I surrender to thee my skull of milk / My purity / My teeth / My hunger / I open myself to thee / I surrender to thee my fears / I make a temple with thee and with horror / I open myself to thee / I surrender to thee my blood and that of my sisters / Together we will worship your incarnate jawbone / I open myself to thee / Dripping / Splattering / My desires / My anxieties / I open myself to thee / White God / To the forbidden / To thy stain / I open myself to thee.’”

A normal girl would digest the lives of others, the warmth of others, to heat her frozen Plutonian reptile blood.

“A volcano is like a person’s mind: a mountain in which madness burns,”

Deep within me lies a faceless mother: a God with aerial tentacles piercing nature’s palest season. Her breasts are a garden of nibbled vegetables, a mother pond of anacondas, a wandering uterus, a jawbone, that drenches my heart in her perfect milk.