A quartet of intruders

Orange weaver

We can afford corn, though,

starch, binding the precarious diet,

mordant, slipknot of the belly crochet.

I run my hands over new folds in the shower,

the orange weave hardening,

becoming Kevlar under my skin.

I know, from cadavers,

how tough this apron is to cut

away. Maybe now, knives will bounce off

if I’m stabbed.

But what of knives in the blood?

I think, vertiginous, of fat, and risk factors,

orange syrup swamping my pancreas,

clogging my arteries.

They say salads can sate the weaver,

unravel some thread.

We can afford corn, though.

Let us eat corn.

Febrile

1. Be otherwise kind,

   but not to this premonition of death.

2. Remember that invaders have chosen

   to trick this body,

   and you must intervene from without.

3. Douse, titrate efforts against rate of drop,

   the hour of the night,

   and the shiver and cry, bloody-minded.

4. Hold the line;

   say: “This far, and no further. Now, retreat.”

Dermatosis papulosa nigra

At a certain age, I began to sprout

pangolin scales, a constellation of black

under the orbital faceplate,

an adaptation to ultraviolence,

a radiation of my own —

spines, discs, spears and shields,

the whole body as ward for the eye —

hamsa, incantation, cowry coat,

cower to fend from loss of sight,

from galactic lances, a whole body

as word for the eye, prophylaxis,

pills as manhole covers above

the vitreous space of eggs,

their nuclear stars, the shelled brain

growing into corrugated shield,

a dress of roll-up doors for

my final evolution: rock, in fire,

not burned.

Medical séances

Acolytes we filed into a darkened temple,

luminous film of arcana below the priest

figure in front, casting visions overhead.

In the projection we learned to listen

for the murmurs of hearts that wanted to speak,

and the dead we did not allow to.

After, Pa James, he with the ligature of his hanging

still on, was our cadaver. We stripped the gnarly

windbreaker of his skin, his fleece of fat, for anatomy.

Routinely felled by formalin fumes at night,

it was worse later, in morbid anatomy, too-gleeful

residents brandishing sternal saws like bread knives.

All the dead could teach was the fear of life, and how

it can end. Benign sturgeons-general, schools in tow,

swam us past tufted-ear stingrays but we drowned still,

hydrophobic. Resuscitated after medicine, I remember

little but the Latin, an oculus being the grasp of a brain

on stalks. Pick your colour. Forgive me, father,

I am not the Esau you sought, with a stethoscope beard

to make you proud. Had I listened to spirits of dead

doctors who named everything after food ― bread-

and-butter pericardiums, café au lait skin, poma facies

with nutmeg liver, on a cribriform plate ―

you might have liked the meal I made you.