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Anatomicon
Hal Y. Zhang
Reading our earliest communiques and— gross gross, two alien species darting alien proboscis. How we gained full mutual sentience, like a child learning this is the specter of blue, the sky, all of it. the unbound above, not nothing. blue. sky. blue. sky blue. This, then, is you, your pieces and how they match mine, hole to hole the same topologies. Brown. Eyes. Tap tap tap. Hooked on phonics, hooked on your nose, no-nonsense. Open for finger aaaaaa aaaaaa to taste mandibular sea. New inlets, tell jokes to spill tides, touch to murmur waves, (hairs) winding round my phalanges to spin tapestry of us excavated by future archaeologists, tangled fleshless, sacrum to cranium. Sexual behaviors of early hominids they publish, rave reviews, do you know they were just like us, all positions having been discovered by earlier primates there are only so many. Doesn't take a genius, just takes two. What are you thinking, your ribcage rattles. Just our rites. They'll never know what our bones do.
Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist who splits her time between the east coast of the United States and the Internet, where she writes at halyzhang.com. Her memory-and-loss chapbook AMNESIA will be published by Newfound, and her collection Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press.