I have a vision of myself, raw, skinned, skinless, salted and red, on the coldest black marble on which the hottest fire is reflected, the fire being the earth, or just my life, or an apocalyptic event that I must behold except for my skinlessness and for the coldness of the marble and the heat of the slow explosion and the salt in my wounds I cannot bring myself to watch. My eyes are crimson-pink, bulging from their sockets, wild from crying. An inkling of a thought occurs to me and sends spasms across my body (nerve signals? muscle contractions?) and all I can do is whimper before everything is gone. 

I have a vision of my mother. Everything is that film blue-green-grey, and you are clutching at the bathroom sink. A pretty porcelain bride. Unprepared to sacrifice your maidenhead. From then on you became a mother. I try to have a vision of you before then, but all I can conjure is colored in a faded sepia hue: your third eye wrinkle-scar fresh and red, you picking glass out of your Ate’s hand, you sobbing, keening when Papa Audi fell from the roof. But never your whole face, not even your skinny legs under your school uniform. 

I have no visions of my father. That well dried out long ago, the earth so choked that the soil crackles and snaps even in the shade. Snaps on perfectly neat serrated edges, just as intended. My father, I remember, has a long life line splitting his palms in two. I struggle to draw a connection between his hands and the well that feels meaningful. I shouldn’t. I should stop here.

I have a vision of my sister. Once red, all raw, it is now green, all mold. It is her in her buttoned cardigan, statue-esque (stiff), poised before a copy of Matisse’s The Goldfish. Hissing: our relationship is not cost beneficial. I watch her chase a dream manufactured in a fluorescent-white factory, cobbled together by mangled migrant fingers; she proves herself, repeatedly and exhaustingly and sickeningly, exceptional. Summa Cum Laude. All she grasps turns to gold (only after studying throug\h Thanksgivings, and Christmases, and mom’s birthdays, and our family vacations, and—), except she and I never touched, not even while asking for your blessing, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which I’ve never received. 

Would that I had someone to bear witness. Would that I had wings, bat-like, translucent, veiny, and a long snake’s tongue, like those manananggal I’ve written about so much (self-projection). I would eat myself out of my mother’s womb. Season the fetus with dead sea salt. Drown her in the shit. Cry as I eat, because it tastes so rotten. Regurgitate the fatty gristle, the fibrous organs. Once a sensitive bundle of nerves, now viscous and discolored in the toilet bowl.

Then, envision one of the many multitudes of self light years away: this one curled in a chosen lover’s arms, confessing, dumping dusty hoarded skeletons on the floor. Bear witness, I say, breathless from undressing, skinning, salting the flesh, wincing. Eat, and spit it out! But lover, oh lover, cradles each gnawed bone, suckles on their marrow and asks me to join him, reminding me, a slab of poorly butchered flesh — or a quailing, grieving, yet beloved wife? — to eat.