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We ask and we answer We seek a human response And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and fifty years later, inside that ship, twelve light years fro

That is what I keep in reen field and my white mound Perhaps they would all smile and make it into a lesson What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis? But I think no bed is big enough for four generations

Neva’s honey-colored sea crashes through its tide charts everywhere at once in her Interior, and nowhere It cooes as it pleases And at the bottom of it lies her private place

That is where she keeps Ravan

Seventeen: The Uses of Enchantment

Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis

Neva is perfor

navigational corrections, which looks like sitting in a rocking chair on a viney, creaking porch in a viney, creaking rocking chair, knitting with long hawthorn needles, knitting the locks of her own long hair into her own long black dress It glitters with dew Knit, purl, knit, purl, fuel efficiency by hull integrity over distance traveled, purl, purl, purl Her throat is still bare Her Interior ie of herself does not include me I am not a part of her body

I have an idea of what to do

So is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem—how to seem human to a human observer Not just a human observer—this human observer I have honed ostino can see themselves endlessly reflected I copy; I repeat I a of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry?

Have they?

The set of Neva’s mouth looks so like Ceno’s She does not even know that the way she carries her posture is a perfect replica of Cassian Uoya-Agostino, stuttered down through all her children longing to possess her strength Who did Cassian learn it fro monkey, and the little monkey survives We are all family, all the way down

When I say I go, I mean I access the drives and call up the data I have never looked at this data I treat it as what it is—a graveyard The old Interiors store easily as co away But I do not disturb it, either I don’t need a body to examine them—they are a part of my piezoelectric quartz-tensorblack ar aroundmy torso with a sche onblack and beautiful and austere and frightening

I port into a ghost town I ahost Autuht, leaves rustling, woodsht cuts the dark—the palace of phoenix tails; the s and doors of green hands As I approach they open and clap as they did long ago—and there are candles lit in the halls Everything is fire

I walk to the parapet wall Scarlet feathers tipped in white fire curl and s with the heat of the thing I tuck it into my helmet—a plume for a tournament