I
Today I woke up vomiting long strands of ivy.
It poured from my throat for hours, the dark green tips scraping along my throat lining, and I just had to endure it. The trees bowed down and began to pull hard on the ivy, not unlike a sideshow clown who astounds an audience with his multi colored scarves. I lay back on a mossy embankment, arched my back slightly, dug my fingernails like roots in to the silty earth, and watched those trees make shawls of my throat ivy. They wound the ivy around each other, their leaves whispering like schoolgirl giggles. I was merely the vessel that made the party favors for the elm trees birthday party.
Somewhere around midday the vomiting ceased. The river lifted up into a small stream and poured itself into my mouth, never mind my choking gasps, flailing limbs, and weeping eyes. I needed to be watered for what would come next
I have no choice. I am their mother.
II
Last night I began to weep. My knees were bent into my chest and my hair hung down to cover me like a fragrant mantle. I cried for so many hours that the stars began to blur and slip, and my hair began to become heavy with condensation.
Before long my whole body stretched out on its own and began to float in my own watery pain. Lily pads formed and bumped my breasts as if you express their desire to be fed, mere babies. By dawn my tears had ceased and yet I kept floating by all of the wild creatures whom dipped their heads to slake their thirst in my heartache. They barely glanced at me. In fact, they looked through me. Their grizzly maws and paws clawed at my tears. Elegant spotted throats and hooves braced on my banks.
All of the small red fishes nibbled on my skin, suckling at first, and then becoming insistent. They knew they could not eat of my body, but they were too stupid to understand why. Fish being fish, they soon lost interest bad schooled away to become bigger fishes lunch.
Still I must endure this. I was born into it.
III
I finally spoke to her, tossed thistles into my wind spelling out love notes in all of the languages I know (and I know them all) asking her to meet me at the mossy banks of my river’s edge. She did so creep across the dimming sky, shapeshifter that she is, my luminous pearl.
She did not answer.
I began to become more desperate with my ardor. My rivers began to froth and instead of tumbling gaily over stones, I slopped up higher making embankments slide into frowns at my sandy basin. The plankton held tightly to swimming things. In case.
She still did not reply, and instead began to shrink before my eyes, each night a little smaller until she was so slender I gnashed my teeth, begging her to please just grow fat in my love. To let me make star babies inside of her.
She demurred.
So I stamped my feet and brayed. My earthen robes began to shake and crack all around me, creatures stumbled, new bodies of water formed. I beat at my breasts, and at the same time sent songbirds to the tallest of tree tops to show her how much she meant to me.
On the very day she was at her very most slender, I spied her crawling oh so languidly towards a ball of brightness with the finesse of a well fed cat. They met in utter darkness to kiss and in mere seconds, they fell in love. Then the glowing thing exploded across the sky jubilantly and my sweet pearl, clearly spent, retired to her chambers.
A scream climbed up my throat, spit itself out like a spear, and cracked across the sky in a cacophony.
IV
I am filling up with hatred. I am dripping candle wax, hardening all over, caked with sweat and ire. Daybreak after daybreak I have been forced to watch them love freely. The pressure of my silence clawing ribbons of my patience and all I do is sulk next to the earth, forming shadows now with my conical hive of swarming bees.
This pain of containing it all has weakened my esophagus, sleep eludes me, and I can feel my gag reflex failing me.
So I belch smoke. From this black smoke, my thrown back head, and my immovable lust denied crusted body, spews out ropes of red. Burning pieces of my very passion and love roll down my brown breasts to make rivulets at my feet. The earth around me is cracks of red.
Knowing I cannot handle it much longer, I scream loudly at the fiery charmer who stole my love and in a kind of halfhearted emulation, I explode fast oozing globs, which tumble around me burning and melting instantly everything they touch. The animals shriek in fear, hurling themselves away from my red death. I howl from my deepest depths at the injustice of love and weep steaming streams from my very pores.
Soon I am spent, heaving and simmering on my side. Great lakes of fire are in my hips, cooling in the evening air, and my scorched flesh becomes dark hard clay.
V
I have decided to woo another.
In efforts to show my great appreciation I infuse the plankton at the bottom of my sea bed with my own blood to create a spectacular light show to complement the way my would be lover spreads their fingers across my body. I turn all of my dew in their direction to create prisms to distract them from their daily duties. I pose all of my most beautiful flower heads coquettishly in the direction of my intended. It is a thing of desperation and I know it is unseemly but I can’t do anything else. The loneliness has spread into my very soul.
In the morning she peeks out, blinking her golden kitten eye over the top of my mountain hips. I pretend she is caressing me. I feel the warmth of her tiger breath on my face and I silently beg for her to burn my forests down, rage against the tops of my lakes, and make my stark winters into gold.
As night comes I feel her hot fingers slide away from my deep waters, leaving them instantly chilled in her wake. I know that the one I truly pine for will come then and so I begin to quake, making deep chasms in my earth, so deep that my trees begin to uproot, living things fall into them, and hurt howls all the way down to my core.
