The Germ

The germ flew in with a crack of lightning beckoning silver, slick head glistening with every turn— Or so I imagine it moves In such a way.

Wrought iron puncturing pillows swollen poppies open, pirouettes from intersections fearing the fibrous grasp of thunderstorms in the night. A germ rode in on the spine of arching white siphoning the sky inward, out like a ragged gasp after choking on your Own spit. My sickness in the night must be something of this world. This is why I hide the bottle of sun baked Astroglide deep in a cabinet—behind the bandages and hollow bath tissues.

Miasmic, I strip the linen from the lack, peel myself out of sweat bathed tones of salt and a charcoal beach towel large enough to wrap about my corpse; I laid it out as a joke. Maybe if I tricked my body into dying then the germ would make its way through my eyebrow bone into some other writhing body in the night. I fear the hot slick left behind, I stand at the center.

The world turns just askew swinging on a thumbtack jutting from a cavern of beige paint and drywall after being pushed in then out, in then out, in then out leaving behind a well of heat, the kinetic imprint of used to be instead of still breathing. The streetlights burn through the slits between the blinds, sizzling just inside flesh of night. I can’t recall a before, the last time I felt entire. A breath of fresh air

balanced meal, bottled water glug drowning out the germ amidst candy coated Advil. I’ve forgotten whose pain I am displacing. I fear the most infantile of pains cracks us open so like a Leonard Cohen lyric, light gauzing the body in dull flossy hope found in the rumble tethered to molar from about a mile away.

Suddenly, it’s the placid white of your eye as you see the virulent flash out the window, the world clicks off its axis as a turnstile filing every fear of God into you. And as you trudge to the bathroom, booms bounce you back to the bones a week ago when you almost choked to death alone In that same apartment, barely lived in.

I have to stop exiting my body I have to stop looking for Jesus in every ache because it seems that I’ll never be entire again. Was I ever? When did I last fall into night without thinking about the authors rotted teeth or aching knees. The poets speak about eating sweets, the meat of honey yet never the mouthfeel. After sex, I wash my sheets four times and Double scrub someone else from my flesh. As my sweat hair damps onto my heather gray t-shirt, I realize that as long as I unloose my long curls the nape of my neck will never not be wet. If it’s thundering and my hair is tied up know that I am making the effort to give the germ nothing to grasp as he makes his way through me.