This illness is turning me into a cannibal.
I’m unraveling myself one fistula at a time,
and dreaming of what I can no longer consume:
a scalding dribble of cheese roping my chin;
meat still tinged with pulses of pink.
I’m startled awake by the taste of my own blood
sweetening my throat.
__________________Last week I told
a friend about our last time, when you left
the condom unopened on the nightstand—trick
of the eye, wafer of proof that I’ve been passed
through by the beast you call yourself;
the camel straddled by the leather dream of your brain.
__________________Why is this poem
turning to you? Because rape
does that to us; in the fitful sleep
of sickness, a breaking fever, it comes
to press its forehead to the cooling cloth.
__________________Every night with you
was like this: I had all these children
in me; I carried each one to the bed
you named “Second Coming,” built after she left,
when you had only unfinished wood and time.
But you doubted yourself, broke it, built it again.
And each time you told the story was a different
dismantling, a loss of some vital part
in the reassembly:
__________________first it was tenderness, then
I couldn’t speak without permission, then
you stopped asking, and I couldn’t move at all.
You never wondered why there was no water.
The curd of spit on my belly was an afterthought,
loosed from your throat as if I’d always been
this barren tract of ground you were passing.
__________________And this isn’t an indictment
my love—I keep turning over
and over the same few grains of sand,
comparing memory to definition: say I loved
the ungulate of you; say, every night,
I led each innocence to your bed;
say you kicked them beneath me like pillows; say
you shredded them with your splintered hooves
as I came—if so, then, who gets to choose
the difference between all those nights
and this?
__________________I read through all
the doctors’ reports. I ask
too many questions before
letting them enter me. I’ve already
been promised salvation in the guise
of implied consent, a bound wrist. Some days,
leaning into the oven or into the bowl,
I feel powerful enough to translate each ache
into inquiry. One specialist notes
the tortuosity of my insides, how I take
each thing I consume on a crooked path,
through the length of a twisted course
before it leaves me.
Scope
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