prayers into the sun

there are many days I spend on my back

stretching my arms to fit the sky

as it spills across mountain peaks,

casting gold against shadows in blue

spine attached to string,

lifted,

palms facing the sun,

I hold the earth inside my stomach

the silence opens in the core of the horizon

and everything is so loud and so quiet

as it swells into all that it is,

so large and so small

I fill the empty space with gilded light

incandescing against the fringes of nightfall

parallel wavelengths meeting the eye of the sol,

blinking

static spiraling beneath the skin,

I like to imagine my cells absorbing light like honey

as my body collapses into midnight

there is something disjointed in falling asleep,

in curling into a crook in the mountains

only to wake up again between

cotton bedsheets and the smell of my mother,

a familiarity I cannot name that clings to my shirt

when I dream, I am gone again,

silence blossoming in the prairie,

body weightless

to empty out is to sit in the belly of the earth,

to feel lungs filling and letting out;

stretch toward the sun

and drown in the mouth of the sky