Placenta

by Ash Adams 

I, like any animal,

will eat one hundred bloody masses

if it will help anything,

because animals know that predators

do not run from the wound

but seek it out, that the safest place

to hide something is inside.

Some eat the whole placenta,

lick small howls of the night clean,

which is the work,

the blood and bones, of a mother:

with the heart of a gambler who will not quit,

a doe in the woods tastes flesh for the first time.

Ceremony can hide but not fix

something breaking, something obvious.

No strap can strangle or save the lesson

that it is easy to live for someone

and much harder to die.

One night, I released a balloon

filled with my own air

into a world immediately

more dangerous and more beautiful.

One night, I became untethered, a skydiver,

and knew differently that even for all the feeling,

there is no way to hold on to beauty,

only so much time before the ground.