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issue 13: SALTWATER

nothing is the night

ONA WOODS
Some people think it is Satan’s job to make what is wrong with this world, but those people are wrong. It is Satan’s job to make us choose between the only two things that are right with it.
 —Zachary Schomburg
I
​
We move our bodies through

Like birthday packages

To open up and be reminded

We were born

Of our mothers of our fathers

We were born of the burning mountains

Donating their silk blood to the warbling sky

I want to move my body through the sky’s

Particulate mansions

What’s wrong with the world

Is when you’re in it

You’ve got nowhere else

To go














II

If I could go I’d go to Jupiter

I’d wear Jupiter in its entirety

Like a gown

Like the first gown

I’d wear its red eye over my own

And look to the stars reminded

I was born of the dead stars

To move my body through a dead star

Is to know the world is nothing

To write home about

Which isn’t true

Which I won’t let be true

I’ll die before I let

The world be or not be true














III

Here in the world

I am moving my body to the banks

Of Phoenix Lake

Here in the world

I am orbiting the banks of Phoenix

Lake orbiting beneath the blood red sky

And the many mountains sing their bloody

Chorus to the sky because they must

Because we must

Burn them

Because we must be reminded

We owe our birthdays to the sun

To the knowledge it will one day wake and walk

Down to the Earth and it will burn

Burn the Earth

We must be reminded

The Earth

Is a thing that can burn














IV

Phoenix Lake is the lake I am born of

The lake I return to

The cattails have seen me

Drag my many bodies through their reeds

And the mallards

Remember how I fed them

How I shaved my bones

And threw the dust to the waters














V

I am sorry I am sorry I am

Sorry about the sounds I’ve buried

In this mud

This the sound of my breath

This of my howling

Of when I plunged my fist into the heart of daylight

And dragged back a bloody dormouse

Whom I have buried here in this mud

And who continues to cry

Its crying is what turns

The dirt into mud














VI

We moved our bodies to the shore of oceanic

Night and its calumnious city moaned us

A bloody moan

We wanted to go to the city

We wanted to work our bones into the buildings

How could we know

We were just surface dwellers

Acting like this house we housed our dormouse hearts inside

Actually lay at the sparrowhawk heart of the world

We actually thought

When we looked at the waves curling their agony beneath us

That we were seeing the ocean














VII

What’s wrong with our world

Is how we think

We live in it














VIII

But we’ve only witnessed
The physics of its agony
So we gave it a formula
A formula to govern the agonies

I returned my body to the wound
From which daylight birthed it
I have stained
This glass

With my blood
I have signed my initials
Onto daylight’s skin
I have called daylight

Mother I have asked it
Mother are you
Proud of what I’ve become
Mother look at the size of the mountain

I turned to ash Mother look at the blood
I poured into the sky
And tell me
You’re proud of me














IX

It was time it was time it was

Time to move like a funeral

My body into the ocean

As like feathered smoke I had dragged

My body from Phoenix Lake

It was time it was time it was

Time that killed me

Time sent down the extinct fangs of my night

To worry my body

I am going to live now in the world that lives

Beneath the tidal signals of its agony

And not escape

I make my worried oath to the stars and the daylight that birthed me

And to the lake that spewed my body forth

I make this oath with my hands

Pressed against the still heart of a dormouse

That no matter what happens in this world

I will not escape it














​​X

What comes next
After we have decided that no
We haven’t quite seen it all
And never can
And never can solve the world
Because we are what’s wrong with the world
But in the ocean
There lives a living thing
That uses light to lure and devour
Another living thing
We are not the world
We are what’s right with it
We are not what’s right with it
We are the ones who point at one fish
In the jaws of another
And say
That’s the one I feel for most
And this is how we love the world
By watching it devour itself
And being reminded of the bad things
We did to our mothers
We are reminded that the world is made up
Of stomachs and teeth
Of waves and vessels that ride the waves
Captains who like lightning send their harpoons
Deeper into the ocean than you and I will ever go
And drag out a freshly dying thing
And drag out a piece of the world
So drag me down from the surface of the world
Drag me into the cold heart where light rides
In the sidecar of death
I want to live in the world
The almighty captain
Of nothing

Ona Woods is a trans poet living in Brooklyn who holds an MFA and JD from Columbia University. Her manuscript “Ovumsongs” (then titled “Your Brother Will Be Born in the Spring”) was a finalist for the 2016 National Poetry Series and the 2018 Alice James Award, with poems previously appearing in Gulf Coast, Hobart, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ona's nonfiction has appeared in Entropy. She is founding editor of the online literary magazine Ciphertext, and can be found on Twitter @ona_woods_.
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