this infection

seashells gently drift
beneath these white-foam waves,
this endless, rolling sea.

Because I once rose from the sea
I fling myself into the sea.

My keys, my locks, my music box -
you threw my things into the sea.

The way we touched when first we met,
the gifts you bring - this blue, the sea.

My fingers, bare of anything.
You thre my ring into the sea.

Oh Siren, must your cry by hoarse?
You sing like one who knew the sea.

winter trees lean down
ice-laden branches. this frost
haunts my finger-tips.

frostbit, the age-old
ache buries into the bone.
it melts, but does not thaw.

no footsteps marr the
ground on which we walk. i am
the first to cross this path.

black rook, stark against
the muted sky. it does not
remember the rest.

a leaf that falls and
crumbles to the ground. footsteps
crush all that is left.

december pearls touched,
covered our empty stage. leaves,
hidden beneath these
rocks, these well-worn stones.

The stillness of a stark night envelopes
me. It is dark. I cannot see.

The clean white sheets are threatening.
It is like climbing into a hospital
bed, and I am uneasy in its folds.

Oh, I am old, and covered in aches.
The stiffness of my limbs belies my age.
The ensuing years have done little to
dull the memory of what was done to me,

but there is nothing I can do except breathe,
breathe, breathe. No dreams.
The sheep are all dead,

caught in the act of trying to fly
over a moon that was too high.
The act of dying -
they land on the spikes of a fence.

And I am sure I know what happens next.

There is nothing that can ease the tempest
in me. I watch the ceiling. I continue
not to sleep.

The day the air breathed into
fog, the truck drove headfirst
in the frozen pond.

A cracking of the ice, a sheet of
white masked what most thought of as an
accident,

though it was clear that it was
not. The guardrails, well-defined,
the bend of road belied
the truck's intent. 

Methodically, the truck swerved off the
road and, calculcated, flew into the air.
With fender pointing up toward the
sky, the cab and hood crashed down and
disappeared.

A copse of cops and passers-by
stopped by to see the truck that did not fly.

Now he is drowned.

there is a ghost beneath the stairs
with long and cracking finger-bones,
i do not know how she got there.

maggots crawl in matted hair.
the corridors, she stalks alone.
there is a ghost beneath the stairs.

a hollow grin, an empty stare,
protruding ribs and collarbones.
i do not know how she got there.

the howling wind is cold and bare,
the air is thick with growls and groans.
there is a ghost beneath the stairs.

the muted voice of some despair
is cracked with age and overgrown.
i do not know how she got there.

a shroud of rags is all she wears.
they killed her once with sticks and stones.
there is a ghost beneath the stairs,
i do not know how she got there.

she walks in through a haze of smoke,
she was a girl, she's now a ghost.
her stench reverberates the air,
her scalp is white. she has no hair.
the bones protrude throughout her skin,
she once was fat. she now is thin
with ears as sleek and pointed as
with hearing, small and like a bat.
she does not walk. instead she goes
on archéd foot atop her toes.
her eyes are dim with muted sight -
there's something here that isn't right.

her gown is lace and tattered rags,
beneath her eyes are hollow bags.
her cheeks are shrunken, sunk in deep.
her mouth surrounds so many teeth.
she's bruised and scarred from head to limb
with flesh decayed and mottled skin.
there's something bad that's happened here -
her mouth is slashed from ear to ear.

a glasgow smile, chelsea grin,
but chelsea won't be home again.

Of all the times I should have died,
flung to the ground so I could fly
and hit the earth, I didn't glide.
I started low instead of high
and as I fell, a whispered sigh
caught at my now-receding back.
There are some things you can't come by.
I don't remember. There's a gap.

When I was in juniour high
I was too thin and I was shy.
They used to spit as I walked by,
there was no place that I could hide.
Psychotic when I was inside
and lucid when they brought me back -
where were the doctors standing by?
I don't remember. There's a gap.

I should have took it all in stride.
There's something I should clarify -
when I was young, I should have died.
Mental illness glorified,
I stood there and was terrified.
The bones protruding from my back -
eight stone three or eight stone five?
I don't remember. There's a gap.

Now I stand at twenty nine.
There are some things you can't take back.
Oh where did all the years go by?
I Can't remember. There's a gap.

(note: formatting messed up due to narrow colummns, so poem may not scan properly when read)

Lately, whenever I smoke, my fingers reek
of it, so on my way to the bus stop, I go to the
drugstore to pick up some hand sanitizer.

When I walk in the door. I see a
dispenser standing right in front of the checkout,
and I am reminded of my first day of university, and how there were
hand sanitizer dispensers every five feet that you walked.

That was the year of the swine flu pandemic. That was the
year there were hand sanitizer stations everywhere you went.
In the schools, in the malls, on the shops, on the streets.
Everywhere you werent there were people rubbing disinfectant
on their hands.

I loved it.
Finally, an excuse for my excessive hand-washing, and I could
stop paying for hand sanitizer since it was everywhere I went.
You would think that with my background, a pandemic would just
make it worse, but I thrilled at being alive in a time where
world-wide everyone was getting sicl. I pretended I was in the
fourteenth century and that it was the plague.

I didn't even care if i caughth it. The H1N1 outbreak
was even better than SARS. I felt calm in the eye of everyone's
panic. In class, I drew comics of pigs for the entertainment of my
desk-mate. It was hard not to laugh at the captions I wrote. My poor
pigs were outraged at the slandering of their good name.

I only knew one person who caught it. My best friend's daughter
was seven at the time. Public schools are as bad as public
pools and the kids are worse than pigeons,
passing pinkeye and head lice back and forth.
It's a wonder that any of them get well.

It passed though.
when I came back from Christmas vacation, I noticed that the
dispensers were gone. Only a few remained, by the door,
in the library. I guess that the scare had died down.

It was for the best, I suppose, but I still miss the
way that panic would spread through the room if anyone
dared to cough.

I was afraid you had left me
again, and disappeared into the
air.

When you came back, it was like a
magician had pulled a rabbit from his
hat. You tease me with hope, you tease me so
bad, it's a wonder you came back.

I have fallen back into a
trap. I smoke a pack a day when I
used to smoke half. It's the threat of you
not coming back. It keeps me on edge and
when the phone rings, I fall off the ledge.
I look for you in every car that drives by

but you lied. You didn't come back. You
are the rabbit tucked back in the hat and I am the
gap in the caul.

I am the bad magic trick. I am the
girl who's been bricked in the
wall. I can see through a crack and I don't
like what's going on when you think I am gone.

You think I can't see, but there's a
trick up my sleeve. You have cut me in
half, but I came back.

I have swallowed your wife.
How neatly the pieces of your
life align beneath the stage lights.
I will step on your back. I will
kill the black hat.

I was bisected. My magic
infects. Oh, how I will laugh.

I will come back.

By unpeeling these blossoms, I find you
in the folds of the rind, satsuma sweet
and chilling the air. I don't know when I
last saw you like this, balancing an orange
in one large hand. You said you liked the way
the pieces sectioned neatly in your palm.
I said that when I try, it comes apart
all wrong. There is a trick to it, you see,
a certain way of pressing your nail in
the divide between the flesh and the peel
that parts it precicisely each time,
but it doesn't work when I try. I am
left with a mess that stings the open flesh
where my skin is cracked from hard weather and
stress. You leave your peelings behind, and I,
if I tried, could piece them together and
reform that orange sphere. But when I look at
the ones that I left behind, I want to
cry. I have left nothing salvageable.
No planet can be made from such a mess.
I leave mine behind, but I scoop up your
rinds. I will keep them in my desk with the
rest, as a ward against the day you left.

What, then, is the infection that comes forth?
Is it the swollen throat, the tightening
of the chest?

It is the shriek when I try to breathe.
It is the pulse that quickens when you leave.

I have had it for three weeks. Some disease has its
hold on me. Something has broke in my throat.
I croak when I speak, I drink honey with tea,
but when I drink it, I choke and I spill it on me.

You came with the snow and it
came when you left. It was the space between us,
so close, that chose to infect. I couldn't see straight
and when I left the car and walked to my
door, I was flushed with a heat that I thought you had
shared with me.

You went away, but the fever remained.
The illness quickens, I rise with it too.
I will never be good as new.

Be still, the rock on which I
lie. This burning desire admires my
thighs.

I look up to you find you shuddering
bye. Your smile makes it`s way to my
eyes. A burning desire, I open my
thighs.

Your abscence gapes as wide as the
sky. You looked at me - you can`t
deny that your desire admired my
thighs.

But you are in every car that drives
by. Once I sat in the passenger
side, hiding desire by crossing my
thighs.

I hide my desire by crossing my
thighs. You hide your desire by closing your
eyes. I could tell that you likes me when I heard you
Sigh. I felt your desire when I looked at your
thighs.

I am not still. I am surprised that
you`re not there when cars drive
by. Someone plucked you from my
side. I deny my desire by closing my
thighs.

The day we met, the snow was
billowing down like feathers from
a swan. I know it went well because,
instead of being stricken dumb,

you hugged me when you got out of
the car. You held the door open
for me, and that was enough
to ensure I`d be heartbroken

if it didn`t work out, and it didn`t.
You never called me back. Instead,
you hid yourself and, hidden,
messed up something in my head.

Now, when I look up, I know
you only existed because of the snow.

Water-drops hang on the trees like leaves,
precarious above the still-wet ground.
For the lack of autumn, winter grieves
beneath the cold white snow, the grass is brown.
The lights, through branches, make a circle-shape,
the brightness hurts the eye to look at it.
The pavement cracks around a sewer-grate
that`s boarded up and now is poorly lit
and, safe behind the chinks of a stone wall,
one`s free to fall, and fall, and fall, and fall.

It was the snow that brought you to me

All day I have been waiting to sit down and write,
an ache that bites into the bone.

I spend all day sewing and when it starts snowing
I run to the door to make sure that it`s
still coming down.
Good things come with the snow, you see.
It was the snow that brought you to me.

(Although I shudder and shake to think of the state
I`d be in if you hadn`t been
online that day, but no matter -
sometimes a lucky break is all that it takes.)

I am delirious with the promise of
bad weather. When I walk out the door
I will it to keep falling down, and the
sky obliges as I walk downtown.

I am joyful when the flakes fall down
on me, all bundled up with my worn purple
scarf knotted tightly around my
throat. I look up, I am struck by the
dimensions of each flake, bits of
paper clinging to my hair.

I chainsmoke.
Soon, I am cold.
A barren chill fills me. My bags, my skirt,
I am covered in ice and i think about how the
snow brought me to you.

And i wait for the wind to welcome me.
I wait for a sign from the stars
and I wait, and I pray that you will soon
call me forth like I did this cold weather.