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Our insides are thawing out

and something grows within us.

It is a stranger come to cast us off

just as we cast off the ones before.

They are with us like a stain

dyed in our depths at a needle’s point,

with us as we are caught in the void between bodies

where we have seen their forms or others—

ghostly blue and monstrous

in a world of formless sounds and colors.

Soon we will be like them,

a memory, a precursor,

a condition of this new stranger:

living on within their body

even as we are dead and rotting in the leaves,

like a drained and discarded bottle.

We are cut and divided.

Slowly, we are cut and divided

into sections, the cut a transition

between bodies, a gift between bodies,

a gift to a stranger,

a gift to ourselves.

Through the void between bodies,

the ever-widening gap

which opens as the cut deepens,

we emerge.