Consider the caterpillar. Sculpture of unpetaling into an impulse. Parable of the becoming that dissolves your every aspect. I ask her: do you have any idea of what you are? Could you see something unlike your shape and recognize it as a kind of thing you could become? Do you want something you cannot imagine? Consider, now, the iron beam. A thing of singular desire: to mate with the moist air. We in our human arrogance would design around her ongoing denial. But the iron follows her own will, kisses the saltwind and the lap of the sea and sighs. Yes. This, too, is enough. Blooms into something red and catastrophic. Of her I would ask: is it enough to want? Is it enough to just want, whether unrighteously or not, forgiven or condemned? Consider now the salmon in the spawn. What kind of a destiny, to rush upriver, facefirst, bloodflanked, into your own decay? Salt pulled from her throat and she, too, changes, humpback arching with death. I ask her: will instinct always kill us? Racing toward that which we have always wanted, knowing or unknowing how it will tear us apart? I've been filled with things you wouldn't believe. Stuffed to bursting with nameless longings. Somewhere there has to be a science to it. A principle of want that demands total obliteration. Maybe that's all that want is. The desire to be unmade, and for a chosen love to do the unmaking. Maybe love is just saying, you. I choose you.
[Originally published in the Lambda Literary EMERGE Anthology]
[https://www.amazon.com/Emerge-2022-Lambda-Fellows-Anthology/dp/B0BW3455RP]