In the springtime, a zombie showed up,
breaking down our door and biting me.
Friends and neighbors asked questions,
not daring to come near,
leaving flowers, candles, baked goods
on our crooked stoop.
Small birds teeter
on the wires by the feedstore.
Crows scatter broken seedpods
beneath the streetlight.
Flowering weeds crowd the dusty sidewalk,
sickly yellow or red as blood.
I slide into the MRI machine.
Sleds slide downhill, propelled by their own weight;
my movement’s horizontal, made through means
outside of my control: a man in green
scrubs bops a button, turning me to freight
that’s fed into the MRI machine.
You wake up in pain, again.
That thoracic disc twisting in on itself
like a corkscrew unable
to spiral back out of the pulp.
It’s work make-believing
your way through the long week,
bearing someone else’s dreams
on your employed shoulders.
if not a healing wound?
toes missing, trans-metatarsal amputation,
remaining tissue puckering deep pink:
raw beauty in disfigurement.
He shows me pictures on his cell phone,
the toes felt doused with molten metal.
Before debridement: brown-black,
the foot decaying like a leaf in winter.
What happened to the fish
I ask the receptionist
The plastic seaweed was toxic
She replies with a shrug
So we sit and wait watching
A string of jeweled bubbles rise
To the surface
In the otherwise empty tank
to watch his memory falter,
fail. Light fades and falls. Dark
to watch his memory falter –
Cans of beans: gone. Toothpaste.
A shoe, bills, a sister –
to watch his memory falter,
fail. Light fades, and falls dark.
She’d moved west to Seattle; by phone
we compare treatments, numbers,
chances.
Hanging on, she says: we are survivors.
“Am I going to die?”
Little sister, in recovery, hair splayed behind her like wings,
eyes round.
“No,” I say, “they’ll fix it.”
Twelve years ago.
She was 47, then.
Occasionally it sounds like
a cathedral tower full of bells
but usually it’s more like the last
scatter of cicadas at the end of summer,
an almost pleasant buzz and whirr,
we enter
there is
one emaciated body, encased in ivory blankets
and
one clear-walled plastic bag
hanging from the edge of the bed, ominously filled with red liquid
i feel my stomach churn
They add colloidal gold
to glass, sometimes,
to make that ruby color. They heat it,
render it liquid and viscous, and
when it is just right,
the master glassblower blows into it,
