I'm Italy Mone and this is The Slowdown.

Today's poem honors our own personal mythology and how the imagination can transform our reality

into one where we can be our whole selves, a thousand cardinals by Julian Randall.

Imagine my first moon wasn't a moon at all but a crescent incision in my mother. Imagine my

disappointment when I realized no light would ever be so full as the goer I passed through just to be

born. If I am ever as successful at leaving as I aspire to be I suppose it would go like this.

I decided to stay and then a bloom of cardinals peeled themselves from my back. I splinter

into a thousand dead relatives just like that. I'm my mother's son all over again.

What was the last thing you loved enough to open something that was not a border? I was born

and the scar makes my mother exactly the island that her parents fled. Every sacrifice

begets a question. What would you give to never have to flee again? I mean my father asked my mother

to not teach me Spanish so I would not be confused. My mother traded her tongue and I sound as if I

am only his son. What sacrifice to say allegiance to my small dark mouth and not be understood

on purpose. Wash the moon clean of crimson until I was barely born at all. In order for me to

exist somebody has to have had sex. In order for me to exist one thing has to be at the gate

rattling until answer. At the end of sex a sacrifice has to be made unless a sacrifice was made

during. I do both just to be safe. I give and give my tongue and I am my mother's son because the

tongue keeps showing up in my mouth. I want to stop being this way. I ask what it would take to be

a sacrifice worthy of the sacrifices that precede me. A trail of wings through which the sun appears

to always be in retreat. I am placed in a school that costs my parents so much. The nature of

sacrifice is recursive. We give up home after home. A child is left at the brink of what is known

and we trust an illogical love that I could bring myself back. I want to know when enough has been

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