Green Linden Press

in the lab / ill

The fever piled on, dragoned bitterly and quarreled and the opposite poles adjusted and reversed and were fixated on a star-like passion no one could name. Mistakes were raked from their ashes. When I went to add the tincture, the room grew spooked and quiet and at the windows the trees were heroines and a serious pinch of light fell like mothwing dust or photography powder from any place I looked. The smallest elements journeyed like a question. These still weighed the most. The window was cutting a key to the light. The window was unspelling a reptile’s breath. The window was wrecking itself against the mind’s sharpened edges, was staging that drama again and again.

The nerve endings set into a belated landscape and from there their pleats spelled a constant itch, a minimal pain, a twin to the myth of territory perishing at the asphalt in a foot, the limits of a hand, the body’s device set down as a replica and arresting the cells’ iconoclastic beat. As if each clip of laughter were a dizzy weave and each sob were an uneasy look enlisting the ridicule, the face.