Instrumentality

She lies, vacant 

eyes to the sky, on a raft, yearning for something

she will never reach.

Trying to survive, she holds staunch

to wood, splinters burrowing in

her grip. Clutching panels of oak, slabs 

deteriorating,

barnacles blooming on bark like bruises—

she waits 

‘til tide reaches her thighs, 

slipping into her 

seams, dancing over her flesh,

‘til rivulets of the ocean coat 

her bones, damp and 

sick. She feebly roes and wades 

through. But the water 

is crimson. And gushing trails 

of blood, reflecting off

unfilled irises of women

slipping off their boats

while waves crash

into inanimate statues of crumbled flesh.

Their mouths agape.

Sanguine floods ark

into waterfalls marking this

national instrumentality, no—this feminine

deluge, slaughtered through

ignorance,

being flooded by man-made 

divinity—cleaving

down their brutal orders

with their sharpened gavels.

And sentencing her to a slow 

death. Canals of 

carnage, tears, and despair

stream down, lancing Longinus’s

spear through her chest,

nailing bolts to her uterus,

leaving her on a raft

with no rights to grasp.

Hypochondriac

Dark marks mar my skin,

shifting

under transient light,

and staining my face from

tears, 

scratched with salt and 

bitten tongues,

bruising my rough flesh,

bubbled up from my

gut. A thousand mirrors

behold my thousand

afflictions. Spewing—

spitting—spite

from my mouth: tart,

turbulent, bitter, bumpy.

Tasting of infinite causes

of anguish.

If I cover my eyes, will

I doom myself? 

My ignorance 

could lead to sudden death,

so I bunch it all up into crinkled 

notes. Spiraled lines and smudged

ink. 

Blots 

dance all over the page

like my dripping snot. I hand it over to doctors:

receipts of

suffering, pockmarks panic, martyrdom

and watch them tear it up, dismissing

infractions as anxiety,

littering 

the linoleum with apathy

and paper 

flakes. And I scoop

them up, always carrying a piece

of them in my pockets, never knowing—

Is it anxiety or death?