In their native language the elders have taught me how to say, I hear your skin darken. To be that animal is to make godless music with the wave of my tongue, a series of cymbal crashes in the orchestra pit. You stand on the land bridge separating the villages while sliding the edge of a blade upwards along your palm. Oh vision, oh spirit of the ancestral throat. A newspaper details the story of a woman with a taste for uncommon spices, who spent time among lesser beasts, rewriting scripture in her own image. In a plazanorth of the capital, a knot of snare drums rings tightly, a spilling of eighth notes, measure for slanted measure. Artillery shells form a crown around the caravan, reserve a claim for the earth and its daughters–spires of dirt and rock slurring the air. The outsiders will record in their discolored papers the ritual summoning of panthers, black pelts against the moon, of orphans wearing their corrupted teeth as amulets. The elders have also taught me how to say, We will remember like the dust in our hands the man that you have failed to become