Learning physiology and its softest
derangements,
the diseases are all faceless—
alive only in the minds of the
people who
know.
A woman held out her hands with raised purpura,
a blurred-out wedding band,
and a wrist
tattoo.
The thing that I find the strangest:
heart keeps its beat
by waiting.
I’m weaving my way through the names and the figures:
doxycycline is a bicycle;
flecainide, flood-tide
road-side
rock-slide.
I found an easy companion in thrombotic
with its
drum-beat-click
and we walked beside each other
in step.
thrombotic
There are other things I could have said about her hands.
an unmarked grave to
a throwaway day—
the picture snapped on a busy afternoon;
the ED humming like a church basement.
thrombotic
Dizzy with grief,
friend of her sorrow,
alive in her cage.
I touched a heart in its chest
and felt it
raging,
raging,
raging.
