I start in the monsoon when the river was swollen with silt and the debris of broken tea trees, crushed lantana and the dropped unripe fruit the orchard shed before the seed could be viable.
I am carried with the flood, fingernails crescents of mud, swept into sidestreams that do not bear any name, and my skin sloughs off, my own name silt in the riverbed.
My babies, too, driftwood children, submerged, emerging, finding lodging in the rock then working their way loose, twisting like a compass needle, yearning not for north but for sea.
Can I call them babies if I did not birth them, but merely allowed them to fall from my pelvis, ignored sloughings, the detritus of meaningless life?
What if I let them subsist on whatever they could grasp and they grew up half-salt, half-scavenged sugar and just a little fish?
Perhaps a line will hook them, give them meaning through a swift blow, gutting, scaling, guts thrown to their brothers.
Perhaps they will find themselves homed in mangrove muck or in some amphibious god’s estuary haven.
My dreams mean nothing - children propel themselves on their own tides, breathe their own air.
Listen: the thunder is summoning the drenching, that storm’s coming for the mountains again.
The river in spate, I swim helpless, rainsick, to the source.
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