I am trying to rewrite the ways I name blood—scarlet ribbon dancing in me; a hex of summer tanagers who refuse to silence. It is hard to make pretty of what America makes sport. It is hard to know my blood wishes to exit my body. My mother calls, says her brother has a cancer that sleeps in him, like her father did and his father before, a small seed blooming in us, singing in between the cells. It is hard to die in ways that are unknown to us. New assassins, lying in the field of our platelets. From what I understand, the blood is a script. A myriad of scrolls unrolling themselves within us. A play we are never to unlearn. Some call it by its god-name; fate—I just call it amurderer. This not to say that I have met death and bested it or understood its blades—no, I have just befriended the only eventuality to ever exist. And this makes me no better than you, one who believes in god and love and the way the light falls from the  illuminated cheeks of a disco ball just after a three tequila midnight. We were meant to break, that is the purpose of nature. The red in me now twinkling with new toxins. Or were they there before? I do not know.  I am out of definitions and yet, here I am trying to still breathe. So what if my blood is just a skulk of violent foxes racing towards an unending forest? What are we to learn then, in the heat of their noise?

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