Last night, I wrung free the dirt clotted on my palm, smeared error onto jeans, shrugged off my flesh like some necrotic bustier. I wanted to find the advanced technology of the body, the stuff made from Shi’ar hardlight, where photons congeal into ooze, ooze into clay, clay into muscle and steel. Unless the body is an altar, one with candles askew and the scent of pine needles singing the lace at the hipbone, the kind of lace that is frictionless, that can speed. Unless the body winters well. I met the gods who rule the planet Apokalips, the ones who oversee Themyscira. There are new gods here, building a new universe. They are carvings on a wall, the ones that inch forth from ink as it is dragged across the abdomen, as it pools in the navel. And when we switch positions, we Rorschach the sheets and hang them from the windows, like a list of theses. What with my body on the dais. What with scalpel and crop in hand. That I might bleed out a true statement. That I might beat it out. Off in the distance, we comb bug from hair, male from female, dirt from dirt. If we kiss, it would be allegory. In the 19th century some pope, a Pius, wrote down the best lies he knew, called it a syllabus. I’ve chewed each cell of my body and released the essential oils. I’ve ransacked even my least popular cavities. I’ve held captive all murmurs to the contrary as if they were impounded waters ready for abstraction and I were the weir. And abstracted, I did. Learned the best errors—like bracelets of submission can deflect bullets, like when the body loses it will reimagine itself as the Pheonix Force, like a single brush of the horsehair and sepia tracing over the hiplace will make a pretty fiction of an other. It’s good to have a list of lies, as the body when meat has little to offer. It’s good to have something to study.