I am a man though I believe
I once breathed as a mother
in low sunlight who drank milk
from cows grazed in cemeteries.
Under the same moon
I blink under now, she nursed
her neonate son before a fire’s
dancing limbs. I wonder
about the trajectory of mortal flesh
seeped into grass, ruminated
in cow stomachs, then filled her own,
sending a calcium cocktail
from her breast to the son
enveloped in her grasp.
The moonlit man I am
digs through veneers of deaths and births
to hold this mother’s skin
alive in my neurological hands.