This is the beginning of what’s certain.
Fullness and inevitability. No way out
of this pit where the sun shatters into
shards tongued between teeth. Vomit
the sun. Pluck the light, first with fingers
and then with pain, impatient, a room
where nausea and radiance hold
hands and pray to a living god. Silence.
All voices out of sync in ceremony.
That’s what people do when there are no doors
and no windows. No roof, just a sky
of awe or anger. Russell’s sign
healed over, red knuckles, ambiguity
when hunger overtakes the day. To be sick
in this way is to reject without recourse. Orbit
around the sun every day in a body that is
just a body. Partial paralysis, medication, motility.
All memory leads here. The surface of a mirror
slips and shines back a moment: brown hair
tied back, ossuary of birds, red-throated
and rotting as dinner falls into a trash can
lined with bags. No apology, sorry, sorry, no
apology. A meal made out of finger bones, snapped
at the joints, thinning out of control. Flush of salt water,
bile and rays of sunlight thrust into the mouths
of the devout. Worship when the dish
is empty. Poetics begin where bulimia ends.
Where the differential diagnosis is confused
by decades of self-made violence. The violence refracts
light and crashes into other violences. Poverty,
colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatter
one day, if not now. Desire rejected will return
home. Will roost inside home, that bright thing, the curved
beak that indicates eagle and not raven. Eat
the flesh raw. Don’t waste a morsel.
