The wind hosts a funeral.
My heart whitewashed in bathwater.
I peel clean at the edge
of the butcher’s sabre.
My haemorrhage blushes.
I can’t discern
if the air is mourning or celibate.
The way my fingers mold the knolls
on my face like wild radishes.
Every touch retches me. I confess
and it is blasphemous. I quiet
and it crackles a potter’s clay.
I vase into forsythias
and the fuchsia rots.
I sit by a pool and feel the water.
Its inferno engulfs me. I mouth a cigar
and its smoke thins into a thread
crotcheting my veins. Nothing
should have to suffer this way.
Again, God heaves into my sutures.
My carapace, like a gill, exhaling
stale air. My bones
a cracker of dry leaves.
In a pocket of blunt knives,
the lungs still wound.
My tremor is wolfsbane—light
sinewed in the silver of full moons.
