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
Be otherwise kind,
but not to this premonition of death.
Remember that invaders have chosen
to trick this body,
and you must intervene from without.
Douse, titrate efforts against rate of drop,
the hour of the night,
and the shiver and cry, bloody-minded.
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.
Footnotes
This article has been peer reviewed.