Chapters (25)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Valley, Uncanny
- The Hospitality of Strangers
- One Hundred Days in the Cave
- The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice (A Story)
- Exactly Like You
- Harness
- Orphan: The Plural Form
- The Error of Blood Relation
- I Will Make an Example
- The Limit Case
- In the Other Future
- Like a Second Person inside Us
- Autoclonography
- Unalloyed
- Paradise
- Replication
- My Singularity
- Notes
- References
- Illustration Credits
- Acknowledgments
- Funder Acknowledgments
- About the Author
16. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. My past was invented, implanted, and accepted. I’m more real than you are because I know I’m not real.
17. Empty orchestra. You can see through me, you can trust me, I have nothing to hide, I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere.
Like a Second Person inside Us
Like a Second Person inside Us
Gorgon, guardian, weapon—our armor like a second person outside us
Now eyes, in the end, breakable
A bouldering heart, a cave like a sister inside her
Eat the whip, the privilege
Our bones like a second person inside us
Caves and brides, this unblooded
Bed, Antigone and her irreplaceable ___________
Unburied, the broken king
A father with scars
At the ankles like buttons
Abiding his skin, his prophecy like an unborn child inside us
A gallery, atlas
Judge of the dead, we are on the stage, we are at the altar. . .
Shade mother bound in beeswax to mechanical father
The sport of sword falling
Oceans trenches swallow to ravish
Sheet of sun gold
Hammered above, behind you, lonely oracle
The Minotaur’s roaring heart
Between dynasty and doors in the universe
Porches of the spirit
The nest we pluck from the hedge like a dried flower
Fireflies candling, the jar
A glass bead, an eye a liquid room swimming inside us
An urn of watery light to drink and drink
Our bones like a cabinet locked narrow inside us
Organs of the secret life
Campfire ash or rebellion of moths
Powder and pollen, my baby turning to chalk
A starry crown of bees, bits of hive
And honey in the wind
The body a sweet factory, a pyre
Our bones will harbor a fire like a second person inside us
An unfixed form, a phoenix for hire
A tempest brings all
Orphans home, follow
The dark veins and plumes of planetary skin
The weighted grains of the flightless
Our bones felted and feathered like a second person inside us
A hundred thousand eyes
Glass the horizon like a captain
These paper woods all a tumble
Each trunk a curved boat of time
Your mind no more than a mushroom
A burrow, branch, floating motes make a wedding dress, white inside us
From stars callous
To receive now, a gorgeous garment
A robe and a family
To wear it on our backs, mantle of atoms
Our bones evolving: step-by-step a more specialized person inside us
Our very own Darwin, beaks and seeds
It won’t be long now
This combustion dwindles, hurries to adapt
Before the next glacial age, ice birthing and calving, a frozen ocean inside us
Before the long night of dreams in reverse, inside out, in the invisible orchestra
Autoclonography
Autoclonography
for performance