I
My skin bubbles out of the rips in my jeans
meniscus of lipids and epidermal casing
protrusion of unbalanced humor and wood and fire
A specimen for Galen to autopsy
I find renditions of my body in ancient texts
and in the rural neighborhoods
Where real estate is cheap
But clean air is expensive
Bodies less valuable than houses
Denim, more worthy than the places
Our skin intricately maps.
II
I follow mine,—
a GIS of bad self-esteem and where
I deserved it—
To my jeans
In the car
On a road that is bumpier than I remember it
With a seatbelt that I can’t manage to unlock
Swelling out of my back pockets,
I can hear the crinkle of the sugar,
What biology calls energy,
An endless cycle of gaining, and loss
I try to pull them out—
But all I find are receipts
They’re buried deep
Underneath my pale skin
Candy bar wrappers seething
Like maggots,
infesting bruised fruit fleshes
I’m scratching now
Bleeding soon
My hands are full of empty flesh
And squirming things:
Larvae
III
Every candy bar was covered in them
Filled with them
I only remember seeing them now
How could I forget them
Falling into my lap?
They’re in my hair
All over my arms
I pulled one out of the corner of my eye
writhing
As if it actually wanted a chance
At its disgusting life
I keep finding them in between my teeth
Clotheslined on delicate pieces of floss
Their guts smear across my molars
Inevitable, every time I chew
I can feel them infesting my tonsils
As I speak
My corpus callosum is weaved of the
Silk threads they spin
As they creep to all of the most wrinkled
And ancient corners of my head
I feel their growing legs
Splinter out of their bodies
Behind my ear
Inside of it
deafened by my own skin
I live inside of myself, I writhe around me
IV
I pleaded to Him,
Hippocrates,
Begged for sutures of philosophy to cure me
Said I’d sew them in my skin myself
He wiped maggot tears off of my cheeks
And pinched one in between His fingers
A creamy, fattened thing
Said “These are just the symptom”.
He diagnosed me
“possessed” by something else,
“unnatural”, He said
Grotesque, I said
He nodded, Yes.
V
I need leaches to get it out
He said I need to let them bleed me
until I’m empty
He made sure to say, “until they die”
VI
So I tried
Letting myself
Letting them
Letting my flesh be consumed
and I consumed them,
myself
And after the initial rotting
of the flesh inside me
(I found myself enchanted by the scent)
A perfume of endings, and beginnings
A cloud of all those places I deserved it
And now,
My tongue runs across smooth teeth,
There’s nothing creeping in my veins
or in between the folds of my brain
Growing in the fluid
Finally, I think un-webbed thoughts:
pump pure blood
VII
Everyone tells me I’m a model of control
How can you let yourself like that?
They follow my trail of blood
Whispering behind me
“I couldn’t do it” they say
“I wouldn’t,
I mean look at her”
Look at her, I say
