I chase my own > devour it > turn over like an ill stomach.

Rings of steel spindles pressed sharp into scales. They coil in my periphery.

Spin faster like burnt out tires, return to me my listless innocence, no, again,
envelop. Murder myself in cold blood—
I am cold-blooded now
—they have made me do it. Yet I am the
repeat executioner, repeat offender, around, around I go.

My fangs bite down just to make my tail bleed;

my head is lost somewhere between my stomach and itself;

my heart is a ravenous lie of a core, a china shell too empty for my self to fill.

Is it ever enough?

So reads the half-pockmarked (body, tail,) headstone of Jörmungandr.

I ferry myself to the river uncrossed, head down introspection. It runs about the edges, a corona of veins, ‘round grass some pretty and mosaic shade.

I am a prisoner of unmapped territory. A fraction of my heart leads me on—I stray or linger, hesitate—it tugs me on by iron acid strings toward the islet ahead, oh how, it’s just ahead. A spot in the distance bleeding outwards, brushing like strokes to tender my hand, lapping up past unsturdy knees. A body that remains untouched. Ostensibly afloat, yet tethered in limbo or limerence, which are perhaps only the same. But if the sunlight hits, if a layer peels and a fleck of flesh falls in hesitant, paper-light descent—you see it. Red, rust. The metal does not glint cold beneath my sleeves. I pull them over, though my fingers inflame, itching with the ropeburn of those tiny plasma strings. Tiny, constricting; unwillingly do I feel their cutting impression upon my skin like the question,

How much?

The ferryman asks me with sullen tears and an empty, supine palm. Silver coins lie in the grass without the tarnish of greed. If only I could cast them, but for a wish? That is hardly a price, but a myth.

Whisper, “How much do you want this? How much would you give up?” The market value of desire: immeasurable.

It is too pure. It is an entire world in a glance, spanning twenty-four point two millimeters, five inches, the horizon. It has a curve to its surface, like a mischievous cheek; it has an ocean like melted chocolate, chaste and clumsy on the longing of youth.

Should we emerge graceful,
take my hand. Or if we remain stumbling, emotional fools,
still, always, take it.

I empty my pockets of weighted coins I don’t need. Shackles fray off into a million threads of promise; I take one gingerly and sew it between us. This ferry, my needle, by which I will always row across and mend a tapestry of tiny eternities.