when I learned to make myself permanent

The month arrived starving. No weather, no blessing— only the half-shell you sent me, wrapped in tissue the way a grandmother wraps a tooth pulled from the mouth of the sea.

I held it to my ear. Its throat still tasted of salt and the distance you had carried folded in your pocket like a letter you could not bring yourself to read.

Above the house, the trees stood open. Each nest a small black mouth the squirrels had walked out of.

The Wolf Moon rose over Cancer, pulling the blood of every mother toward the kitchen window— and I bent to the table like a jeweler bent to her last piece of ore.

Your hair: a single thread of yin metal. I laid it on hanji and burnished— pass after pass with the heel of my palm, until the paper drank the oil of your scalp, until severance became script, script became alloy.

Each strand a small prayer I set into the pulp the way a stone is set into a ring— so that even the fire, should it come, would not be able to tell us apart.

The Mountain in me understood: what is held long enough becomes terrain. What is burnished often enough becomes light.

The world thinned to its last furniture— the chair. The window. The dog at the threshold.

And there, on the paper, your self: transformed, and kept, inside the body I had become a country for.