"Yehudi," she whispers so gently, I can see the air from her mouth arrange itself into patterns of sound and graze the inside of my ear, "you fill me up."

What fills up a goddess? -- not always flower and fruit and incense and butter. Sometimes it is dung and piss and spit and waste -- like Gaia: Mother Earth, the bearer of us all, the goddess beneath our dirty feet. What mother, I say -- eats dung and egests bounties. Goddesses, I tell you, such reversals they embody.

My earthy goddess flaunts her affinity to Gaia with her brownness. Such brownness: you could deposit the waste-matter of your soul and expect a bloom of new spirit in return.

But I have scratched her surface and unearthed her unbearable stink. I have gone beyond those who harvest her musky waters. I have parted her legs and entered her so deep I cannot remove myself from the crater of her womb.

I lie there waiting to die.

This is not a womb meant for birth.

This is a womb meant for death.

My goddess knows more about death than life.