Split the trunk of an ancient one.  
Count the rings like hidden weddings brought to light.  
Know I’ve been wanting to come to die here,  
for the longest while. My brown limbs as roots.

White men I’ve longed for have walked face-first  
into the rainforest and misunderstood it so 
beautifully. Sonnets to the otherness they find dripping  
from the stems of their long fingers.

After I fuck them, will you eat them raw? 

Trees, I want to die and die in you. No other arms. 
No other branches coroneting the sky.  
No other aviaries for corbeau and kiskadee. Kiss me. 

Before I was awaiting death in the life I hold now,  
plump and feral as a grass-fed lamb, I was 

Yours. I planned how I would construct my funerary bower  
in your arms, gird myself all over 
with liana, a blanket of sphagnum moss plucked from  
your bedroom floor. My eyelids green.

More like a basket
            of twig and hair, 
            surprisingly 
            tall
           
            and deep—

                        in a tree
            outside my bedroom
            window.

I knew 
            something lived in there
            you wouldn’t assume
                        lived in a nest.

Then I knew:
            a human lived there.

And once I knew—
            the nest, nearly 
           
            disintegrated, 
                           still in the tree. 
                                   
It wasn’t about trauma, the perfect 
            and then the broken 

                        nest 
            in which a human 
                        lived—

            Born and lit and broken
                                     comes I.