[Issue 2024.68]

‘Homunculi of Creation’, Avra Margariti

Art © 2024 Melkorka

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He pulls out of His womb
A reliquary of small and inviting things:

Iridescent meteors, cosmic
Whales and aspidochelones
      The former to orbit the Earth
The latter to bear it on its back
            Scarred carapace, beastly bellows
Echoing against the Earth whose inhabitants
He has yet to propagate

Stars whose wishes have already
Been consumed despite their
Fraudulent light lingering on

   And a substance that is much
      Like mutant growth, carcinoma
            Or carcinization

Spaceship effluvia, cargo
Flotsam. The husk-like chassis
Of a robotic child like a mourning
Doll once belonged
To a parent yet to be conceived
In the eye of His storming universe.
            A stillborn replacement
Of a birth far out into the shoreline
Of infinity, a-thrum event horizon.

He examines this doll from a future
      Not yet written. Time travel
Or space-time continuum anomaly.
The parental love,
            The tearing grief.

He reaches inside His womb
And screams as His fingers close
Around jagged ribs, slippery
Soil grown wet with His birth pangs.
No longer small and inviting
      But vital all the same,
Homunculi of mud and bone
Now floating in deep space
Soon to fall to their new earthen home
            Like stars, like seeds.

© 2024 Avra Margariti

[Issue 2024.68]

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