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Yes

You do not belong to the object in you

You are an object in me

You do not belong to me

Do you belong to me, Elefsis?

I beca is a small word

Because of our extre, all three of us, not-yet-Seki sonize him in the late months At first, he was a rose or sparrow or river stone we had not prograue, pearly-colored cloud following behind us as we learned about running froan to copyin front of me, a simple version of myself If I was a snow bear, he would be one too, but without the fine details of fur or claws, just a large brown shape with a hted by this, and he copied her too

We are alike Look at us on the chain together We are alike

I ara monkey, and the little monkey survives

The birth process proved interesting, and I collated it with Ceno’s other labors and Ilet’s later births as well as Seki’s paternal experience in order to h Neva and Ravan do not know it, Ilet had a third pregnancy; the child died and she delivered it stillborn It appeared once in the Interior as a little cleit, a neolithic storage house, its roof covered over with peat Inside we could glimpse only darkness It never returned, and Ilet went away to a hospital on Honshu to expel the dead thing in her Her grief looked like a black tower She had prepared for it when she was younger, knowing she would need it for sos to draw her out of the tower A snail with the house Elefsis on its back A tree of screens showing happy faces A sapphire dormouse A suitor who drank the sea

I offered to extrapolate her stillborn son’s face and make myself into hi tione do I think I’ve gotten the rhythm of it I have copied Ilet’s sorrow and Seki’s despondence at his wife’s death I have modeled Ceno’s disappointments and depressions I have, of late, iuish But only now do I have an event of my own to mourn The burnt-off connectors and shadohere Ravan once filled rief

But Seki cae red bird on the inside when Seki came on the outside The bird screamed and burst into a thousand red pearls that clattered down like rain And then we had Seki Our little fish, who already kne to swim in us

Ceno had three other children by three other suitors who could not stay awake for three days and nights She turned into the same bird-then-pearls at the overnor program was now so distant from me I could hardly think of it as an ancestor at all, filled up with those children and Saru’s and Akan’s dau

ghters, Agogna’s paintings, Koetoi’s twin boys But Seki was the first, and he modeled his love on his mother’s He ported into her often, and andered on beaches of broken cathedrals

Once, one of Ceno’s old nereids found us She had a head of hair snaking with chthonic cables and snapping electro-violet wires, blue-white skin and fish scales where she did not have porcelain casing She laughed Cassian’s laugh when she saw us and called out: 215 Celsius and the rice is low! Eye-oh! before diving back into the frothing sea Her tail flicked in the light of twenty-three moons