Crip time-loop pantoum
Relapse is familiar as ink at my distal phalanx
in the daily drama of the body.
Viral loads spilling out over the edges of me
in pain’s ineffable sanctions & complaint.
In the daily drama of the body,
the days slow & swell, sustained catastrophe
in pain’s ineffable sanctions & complaint.
Without crisis. Collapsed fantasy, all recovery.
The days slow. & swelling, sustained catastrophe
is everyday trying not to die, trying to live
without. Crisis, collapse. Fantasy, all recovery.
I can barely remember what alleviates flare.
It’s everyday trying. Not to die, trying to live
chronicity’s end of time. Uncharted days
I can barely remember. What alleviates flare?
Time is a body of enfleshed disruption.
Chronicity’s end. Of time, uncharted days
lived. By the map of yesterday’s marrow, yes
time is a body of enfleshed disruption
in tomorrow’s bone. Assumed somatic fact.
Lived by the map of yesterday’s marrow. Yes
here, here, & here, is where it hurts:
in tomorrow’s bone assumed. Somatic fact:
the body a naturalized mythology.
Here, here, & here, is where. It hurts:
to be disbelieved about the immensity
of the body. A naturalized mythology
I will weave you. A story of time travel.
To be disbelieved about the immensity
of viral loads spilling out. Over the edges
of me, I still. Weave you a story. Of time
travel, let us say each symptom was a portal.
Murmuring in the dark
The doctor with the stethoscope hears a kind of wind in irregular rhythm.
A diastolic hiss in syncopation, erratic obedience. A soft mitral ruckus.
But isn’t the heart a crowded room of music harsh & sweet? A congregation
of grievances milk-curdled by devotions to horizons prismatic & distant?
*
In colonial Mexico, the church criminalizes the murmur of the crowd, the buzz of a
rumor. Rebellion’s planning surveilled, cut short. Making police of ears.
The streets susurrate in dissent. Pass the dirt on fathers. Low, continuous.
A sound still here, cracking foundations.
*
I wake in pain. I sleep in pain. I wake in pain. I sleep. I pain
the day as wreckage. My body is a faithless poem.
This swollen hip. This shoulder bruised. This headache. This bottle. This tincture.
This ointment.
This pain, these medicines, companions on a humid morning, in a winter lasting too long.
Ambivalent, I meet these familiars who stay past late & bloat my limbs. Crackle
with fire my joints.
They say the brain cannot hold the torment & the hum together. The song expels
the trouble, so I sing. Or, I try. The adequacy of air a
stranger to my lungs.
*
I sleep in irregular rhythm. I wake to the crowded room of silences harboring dreams.
In iliotibial swell, my legs a wilting hedge of rhododendrons. Bombilate with bees.
Recurrent, softly, the damage.
*
Are we not lovers in every lifetime but this?
I ask not in complaint, but for the quiet of your voice reminding me the next era of our flesh.
All biography a brief convulsion. Tonight is burning with cohabitations.
The glossy red of your kissable mouth the same shape in stutter, pain, ecstasy, roar:
If God is a virus
A virus is your grandmother reincarnate.
—Seema Yasmin, “If God Is a Virus”
If God is a virus, she is my Catholic grandmother swaying to boleros, stilling the forcible kitchen hours pretending to be crucial for a biblical kind of war. She is a woman in charge. Of chicken blood, carving knives, & curative marigolds. Smoking a cigarette while reading the newspaper racked up with battles, army men gunning down farmers for depending on soil. Army men & so-called family men making pulp of our kind. A priest’s supplicative prayer to mass. She, a fever aflame with rage. That’s how she ended up here, enlarging the white pulp of your splenic embroidery. Spitting out virions like the seeds of maracuyá. An epithelial racket & neoplastic mess. My virus is a wily lover who sleeps & wakes against the clockwork universe. Chronic activation is what the doctors call it. Lymphoproliferative. She is everywhere in me. Nesting in my throat. God is not completely understood. A series of unanswerables. Mostly a women’s disease & therefore not worth more funded study. She is made of elusive boundaries. A gamma virus, third brightest star in the capillary circuit. A cytopathic & sero-positive mystery. Doctors call it systemic exertion intolerance & immune deficiency. In other words, the grandmother in my B-cells watched her stamina for violence dwindle. She tired. I tired. Said no more fighting. Wants the war & its lysis to end. Not the owner of anything, God. The infection’s only vanity, a lyric:
I’ll give you the good if you keep the taste of me.