uterine ovenbird “…the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.” John Berger My past is thick with tissue tethered to the choices and chances that turn cartilage to bone. I’m growing towards oblivion. Lidless eyes staring into the dark of a saline sea, tailbone curved into a vestigial question. I’m fed on a flow of umbilical blood and the rich red milk of memory, which turns so quickly to curdled confusion in the acid churn of my stomach. We will all be stillborn, in the end, strangled by the cord that wraps once, twice, around our tender necks. We are twins, you and I, pressing hands to amniotic translucence, reaching for a mirrored soul, an answering heartbeat in the liquid night. When we slide into silence at the end of our days it will be with fingers entwined, slick with the sloughed off endometrium of this world that gave us into each other’s keeping. 260309 what's it to you? who go blather from