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
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_.