When she walked into the forest, she knew she would never come out. She’d let it eat her alive first, the bugs, the animals, the earth. Fires wouldn’t chase her out, she’d squat in it, as she would over a man, and revel in the way it flew over her body. She feared the kind of pleasure fire would bring her, burning her skin and melting her insides before it killed her, like a species that knew no better, like a jealous lover. The pyromaniac’s indulgence, the culmination of this vice, is not to be survived. The erotic has its price, and you must first lose everything to gain everything. And the phoenix flies away a nirvan.

She stayed in the forest, waiting to be found, for the fires to come. She learned the patience of centuries and the slow revolutions of the earth, like a man turning over lazily in his sleep.

She liked most of all to watch the soil bubble up like a stomach when it rained, feeding through absorption. She prayed for pores so large, to swallow with her whole body, that she could taste things not just through her mouth.

She looked at her belly button and thought it might eat her inside out, its own mouth swelling with every breath. Its severed mother’s desire, still squirming around trying to find its other end, searching for its dismembered body. She realized then that she was the amputated appendage.

And perhaps if it had never been cut? To live through her mothers breath, like existence, like fate, and to still eat at the center, gaining nutrition through gravity…

Quad me nutrit me destruit

…eating and consuming itself into a digested implosion.