For days we floated from our homes, then we came to a stop.
The mud buried us. Underground, the infinite dance of soil around moving insects,
the star-nosed moles that played our bodies like pianos. Animals dug us up.
After feeding, they left. Flies came to dress our wounds, the missing bones.
The buzz grew a heartbeat, a fever that woke us to silence—even our sense of smell
had abandoned us. At first, we broke off limbs from lizards, contented ourselves
with half a worm. Anguish was a constant moisture we felt deeply.
If only we could regrow our hearing or tattered skin. Once we caught a lost girl.
We ate her arm to make it grow back, but were met with only more sorrow.
She stopped, like us. And we spirited her away—the body parts, the skeleton—whole.
Our homes are dead. We find creatures that are warm, then cold.
We travel from town to town in search of what we’ve lost:
blood, family, hunger, a heartbeat. Like the living, we cannot let go.