Reflections on RiverFlesh


The language of this poem is gruesome. So much blood and bodily fluid with imagery of sacrifice, inside-out organs, charred heart blood on snow, afterbirth, cauls, hematomas, broken bones and of course flesh.  There is a sense of so much darkness and desolation in lines like "My ripped seam the unsewn hole of Nothing" and "My face inhuman and my eyes a desert."
What is being birthed in this poem? And what is the “ monster,” the “thing” that sheds its skin in the water of the river? 

In these verses birth is equated with a violent cycle, a “calamitous dream of creation” invoking “bestial fear.” 

What is the poison of revenge? And whose revenge? 

What is the muscle between the forefinger and thumb that is the “true other”? Is there anything between those fingers but the self or rather the opposable thumbs that allow for digits to grasp, tools to be wielded, one of the very defining features of evolution which allowed Homo Sapiens to change their relationship to nature by dominating, manipulating and eventually causing massive destruction to the soil they tilled and the earth we inhabit.   
 
What makes us human or “inhuman”? The Biblical reference of the “surge breaking out of his open rib” seems to call on the divide between human, the revenge “poisoned” eden around them and the monster associated with death/birth.  Yet the narrator turns to question if the monster is in fact an “enemy”/”tormentor” or if they are perhaps twins “mired in the same blood.”  Is the monster of destruction that hunts the narrator under the ice actually one and the same as humanity?  Is it human domination and desecration of the earth, the “wreck of snow” (climate change?) that is “melting us to nothing”?  This creature of destruction is in fact the narrator’s self proclaimed echo and future and the narrator is forever scarred never to heal by the ancestral trauma of the legacy of domination, oppression and degradation. 
Is the monster human nature? Or is it possibly capitalism? 
“What more can this be but lords and torches
The workers swallowing misery and lead
All the words born out of zeros.” 
This verse makes me think that the narrator is speaking of the devastation of power and the inhuman nature of systems of extractive production which create a working poor to toil and suffer the consequences mentally and physically from the oppression and literal poisoning of the earth around them. 
It seems the narrator also suggests that despite all the poisoning and trauma we carry or “whatever our deformity” we continue to partner, love, and have children.  But “because we parented the creature,/here ruin is the sign.”  What is the future world we leave as legacy? Can anyone fully heal from these ancestral grief trauma?