To touch the indentation, purled and pinched, centered in a swale
of flesh between bone ridges, point
where tissue was severed, and we were torn from the beat
of blood-music—to crown, to slip the caul, to cry.
We are biomass, cellular matter one shares only with oneself.
Between tocks, emptiness begets emptiness
as we shiver with loneliness
desperate to be enfolded as one might by a beloved, by very Being itself.
No matter how often we bang against each other, thrust
a tongue in a mouth, shift our bodies like tectonic plates, we remain natal.
Breath or gulp or syringe, nothing satiates us, nothing completes:
sweetest of water, semen, Blood of Christ.