Pythagoras speaks to me through his sheet. He is concerned about his body. Not so self-conscious but conscious of the self. In Metamorphoses, Ovid uses Pythagoras for his body. His mouth. He uses it to say we are more than physical bodies. He wants us to know we are able to make our abodes inside wild beasts and to hide away in the hearts of the cattle. He wraps me inside cattle skin. Tells me that I needed to know what it felt like to be unjust. To justify. A tactic my ancestors used to heal wounds. They enter. To count her ribs, the iambics of her back breaking, they open her. She remembers my shape like bread between teeth. But now I am too tired to plead for forgiveness. I use her to heal. Epigenetics, my case. I confess, there is something tragic in obeying a past body. Remembrance is a kind of becoming that blossoms the longer it is ignored. I am an encoded message of torture. I butcher her under apricot trees. I bless her like a promise. If mutations could testify I would be true. A lantern under their mausoleum. I make a gesture as if to start my statement, ruffling papers. Clasping at begin. I cannot think of it this way. The blade, a curve that has deprived me of a self, looping the diameter of neck. She does not mind being a memory. Once I take the knife we are a theorem. A sentence is a theorem. She, an unfinished one. My hands ask for mercy but instead I imitate the arcs of stars. Imperfect, never truly returning. Object and subject, we resolve the other at each pass. A shift so small it is imperceptible at first, links of remembrance. I try to forget that our bodies make each other under the pull of proximity. Visual grammar of tongue. Worship. A natural law. I am encoding a message only she can read. Dadekian: Hebrew and Persian in derivation. My wrist flicks scatter the gods I called to bless. A lyric, conflation of dada and agha, caught between absolute and absolution. Circumcision of agha, Persian for sir, and dada, diminutive of David, a religion from proper heliocentrism to calf. A god unto the other. Decreation by genocide herself. Slain inheritance. My mother told me, be careful this is what it feels like to loose what you love. How could I not? O, arabesque of knife. Effigy of word I burn here. The machine of the beloved that turns her into antithesis. A Priam to an Achilles. The elder begs for the body of son. Polar coordinates of self made manifesto of other. The younger remembers father instead of enemy. Recursion of self and self-conscious create the pitch of annihilation. To consent to faith is the hum. Doves babbling to each other like judges. I keep her inside of myself while she wraps me like a newborn abandoned in the shade, alive, waiting to become someone. An Absalom protected and picked up by another. If this comes from mercy or duty to the ecstasy of naming or genetic consistency for desperation, I don’t know. Later that evening, we made a feast of what was taken. The madzoon of her mother’s milk. What else is there to say?