Umbilical

Who did the cord belong to? If I had been

held long, fresh born, above my mother,

I would have bled out, down into her, down

into that suitcase of blood to which I’d been

belly-cuffed inside her. We were never truly

joined to each other, my egg was just gathered

and put where the sperm—which was mine, in a way,

which was I—could find it, ovum her body had

carried, for me, since her own conception,

and then I went, by my arcane system

forgotten to me now, a secret I cannot

tell you, down the dreamidor

into the living humiform of her body.

My flesh, I think, thought up the leash.

The cord was mine. They did not ask me:

Cut—or no

cut? When my mother 

tied me up, that time, it was with her 

childhood sash of blue dancers, 

but sometimes I feel as if my wrists had been

belayed with our human tassel, still 

warm, fresh-chopped, in the ritual during which 

a feral goddess with snakes in her fists 

passes down her gifts.