SEAN MAHONEY
IN HER BELLY
She is clad steel blue-gray and seated at a table.
I cannot see what is spread out before her
and above me, yet she motions me,
motions me closer, higher.
I float outside of her like an errant base.
She resides in me with fishnets and digits.
Homunculus in heels. One, two, look
at those quietly alarming shoes.
Book to book she moves through factors
of Gutenberg and Pasteur, fixed rates,
and amniotic leavings that pass away and
rise again as walkways, ignorant of numbers
and arguments against numbers. Indifferent
to concrete and fingerprints.
Her indigent number 11—
both prime and divisible by gestation,
the loci of inexplicable locations, jerseys,
and ordinals that remain—
is magnetically warped around poles
confined by brackets
and her mustard teeth.
Equations that rely upon this
insouciance of being wither quickly;
sum couple at any time,
dissolve into immense Cardinals
and never see roots again.
Sitting with her heeled feet up on the table,
ash falls from her cigarette that has gone
out and relit in looped diameters.
She fidgets there.
She could crush me.
Belly to birth to book she—
over midnight oils and mortal coils—
instead moved through and factored me.
She told me I would remain
small. And quiet. As if an empty set.
Sean J Mahoney lives with his wife, her mother, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California. He works in geophysics. He believes in salsa, dark chocolate, and CBD. He believes that Judas was a way better singer than Jesus and that diatomaceous earth is a not well known enough gardening marvel.