I inhabit this formless body, which not even paper can name.
—Marta Pérez García

I’m looking for the me in who, tracing its form with my mouth. But I am lost in the shape of the word, its echo, the space I hold inside not me but now. In a documentary on infinity, a scientist says when trapped in a finite form, particles will exhaust every process until they have no choice but to return to their initial state. An apple decays, turns to dust, becomes an apple again. And I’m trying to touch my own blurred edges, the me on the brink of sublimation. So I say who until it means nothing, until it’s just the sound of something or someone I used to know. I hold it in my throat. Until it becomes less of what it once was & more of a thing with an end, less now, more then. Like my cousin, who was, so is now then. She once made fifty white chocolate rings for an engagement party. Her middle name was Rose. And I want to know, if a sound once held a body, does it still? I say who, but it’s a circle with endless points. A rose, a ring. An infinite loop of then, then. I ask my mother if she remembers the chocolate, its dyed-yellow diamond. She says she doesn’t, then says my cousin’s name twice. Two roses bloom from my mother’s mouth—

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Image: “Exotic Entity” by Bill Cawley