WHAT I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU IS
Her name could have been anything,
anything wet and unburning.
Besides, you don’t need a name
to make a prayer: like all air,
they resist such things. Invocation
is tricky. You never who will come
when you call. You can end up with things
you never asked for. When I vomit,
she holds my hair. Each swallowing
an accretion, but bodies don’t make
anything worth keeping. This is how it begins,
the holding, albeit in a different context.
Pray for symmetry and get a broken mirror—
hindsight never does us any good:
if I got another chance I would do it
again. What I’m trying to tell you
is that disturbing the symmetry before
it disturbs you is no way to live: her name
will be another you can never swallow again.
No two spells are ever the same: what
the mirror makes is approximation at best. You
can’t trust it. A complete fraction cancels
itself out, folds in on its body, completes
a circuit, honey-fingered. That’s not
what this is, but in the beginning there was
honey on her fingers. I was there,
I remember. I was holding the jar.