I breathe in my ancestors and their enemies. I breathe in dinosaurs and sneeze. I inhale mountain ranges and sigh. I breathe in lovers and betrayers, and the houses they all lived in, the blankets that covered their sleeping vulnerability, the baby teeth they lost and buried under the porch. Inhale, exhale. We are each other.

My body is a composite, like variegated sand, made of the past and medium for future forms. Star particles look out at the horizon through my eyes, and death is reborn through my newly dividing cells. We own so little, really, just share and receive the meal of our lives in existence’s communal kitchen, full of delicacies and compost, just like our bodies, like our lifetime’s storylines.

My teeth are made of ancient dynasties. My yoni is concocted from the water molecules of a river, once rushing, that carved the canyons. My brain contains particles from mythical beasts we retain no record of and smells like lightning from the storms that excite and race across my synapses.

Some of my memories are recorded in someone else’s voice and refer to a previous face in the mirror. Some of my bones are love gifts from elders millennia past. Inside my veins travels gold dust that sifted down the mountain side, back when their peaks were so much taller, when we were all so different, and yet even then we were all one and the same.

I raise my drink and sip particles of the footed fish who made its way through the discomfort of evolution—and after swallowing, momentarily, I ache with desire to grow into an environment that should seemingly kill me. Such is the first taste of all magnificent inclinations.

I breathe in the dust of who came before, who never knew me, and yet we’re one.

Dawn Sperber

from We’Moon 2017