“If you could do all that stuff and then be dead, I’d say do it.” I dreamed of writing the piece that started like this in the restive moments of waking this morning. It was funny and strange and about death, what would happen afterwards. I can’t remember it now, but I think I knew that would happen. It always does. But it was about this size, maybe a little bigger. If you can let yourself imagine, it was also quite a bit better than this one. I’d be grateful if you did that. Imagine it better. Please do.

I am from bruised thigh, junk drawer, box of borax on the top shelf. I am from vowel hard to pronounce, disordered creek bottom, bloody heel. I am from set of three. I am from formula, jar of baby teeth, sharp-bearded fish. I am from February, from Saturday, from many specifications of the abstractions time and space. I am from hand of my mother, bone of my mother’s ear, mother of my mother’s mother. From a tome of like characters. From filth, from undesirable car parts, from trundled spoilage.

Before the lizard gods, I was shaped from blue clay, my eight fins pinched, scales combed, gills lifted like crescents. I trembled my fins, tested my mouth on coral and young clownfish, dove deep. Above, lands shifted and crashed, drawing lava from my ocean floor. The reptiles rose and fell. Things began to take to the … is it air? New primates grew greedy. I dove deeper, leaving the shallows to those who dared go out in tree shells.

the beginning and the greatest good is prudence
        —Epicurius

Its 94 at noon on a heated desert morning after two weeks of boutique and backroom antics with their scaly echo of that first gill-to-lung-sac thing crawled up from a polluted creek, antics that could only result in unreasonable headaches, love’s alarm disarmed, and end where no amount of languor can mask the bad girl whine from the pineal gland that knows-it-all when the subject’s betrayal and no amount of wishing can take back the clack of chips from the business isopods turning out their Travelsmith pockets at security. This story is my traveler’s tell-all, starts in idiot default. Dopamine disease, not failure, causes risky behavior. What’s the difference you ask, between my life and the lives of others who also smell of a place where the mermaid gave up her tail on her journey from fish to goddess—only a lifetime learning to hesitate, a modest Epicurean eye, the necessary mediation that tempers a wild urge, the hand that gives off a slight organic hint of fountain, leaves behind a wide-awake woman with her slide & scale & glisten.