She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased
so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths
we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming
jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers

was the kind of body with which nothing elegant could be done: we couldn’t bury
Earth in herself. She was a corpse we carried on a titanium trailer bed twenty-five
thousand miles long, joined to a ship six times her size. We towed her as we flew
into the luminous, grieving nebulae. Clusters bowed and winked. Some stars split

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