Moon in Gemini

Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, I submit an application for adoption.

I creep into the bathroom and contemplate my image in the mirror. My eyes are wide. Outside, the moon is an oblong egg. My aging face turned toward the moon is childlike with awe.

I disrobe and photograph myself in the mirror: here is me crying. Here is a shot of me and an onion. My legs open. My feral sex. My teets, the folded skin of my abdomen.

The quality of the bathroom selfies is more loose than lurid. I press send, and photos of my body are uploaded with a plaintive text in which I use the words

• grasping

• hot

• hard

• vital

• wanderer

• wilderness

I am trying to be seductive, much the way a dog will lick your hand, lick your pants, lick your face, sniff your body, rub up against your leg. Thrash its bottom against your leg. Excitedly hump your leg. Rest its muzzle on your leg in adulation.

After I submit the application, I wander around my burrow, lick myself for a bit. Then, turn six or seven times in a counterclockwise motion and lay myself down to sleep.

*

When I wake the next morning , I wonder if I should be embarrassed. But of course, there is no online adoption process for adult women. And anyway, my animal self is disinclined to prudence and good sense.

I have accepted the dialectic of the after life. In which death closes and life opens. Sex and death. And a grown woman could come out from the wilderness.

And grasp what is hot and vital.