aurora linnea
I.
Love Poem for Prion Disease
you blend into me
the trimmings of her halo
procession of slimes
squeezed infective thru the sieve
a single gram, i’ll graze it
the vertigo twinge
her mane oozing from the light
my head cranks in knots
fain to our slow commingling
the blossom’s tint, amyloid
a mouth is no guarantee of balm
II.
Feminine Necropolis #1
hibiscus rot sagging gravid sanguine
off their hedges, like fetal piglets dissected
and emptied and skins turned inside-out
crumpled and soft shell
the swimming girls grave with rapture
in late-stage beach psychosis offer their
terminal chasteness to sharks. red wounds
below their bellies & young blood saturates
the virgin maillots. teeth shall heed the call.
the disease horizon pinkens
it whettens its cancer pinks
against green acids & spidered sky
III.
Feminine Necropolis #2
the faces of killed women
have grown blonde wings
and waft enthroned
over the backwoods. panging incurably
their keening echoes an amnion lattice
of deluge and squall // drapes the flanks
of sacred ancient magnolias. thunder fell
outside the windshield, sleepless,
in slanted lashes.
IV.
how st. mary nursed the martyrs and nurses them still.
I am the patient of the Hospital, walking through the halls of Hospital, in this Hospital where hallways are aqueducts of powdered light and pink linoleum which drift me ward to ward, drawn as if by an undertow of liquid sleep. I am aware of a glaciated quiet, the motionlessness that gathers behind the mirrored walls. The nurses and surgeons are inside their rooms. They do not move where we can see them. I notice my nervous smile oscillating across a pane of mirror smeared with vomit. I stumble over something metal in the hallway leading out to the Sunning Terrace. The floor here is littered with blonde wigs, lonely, like the molted husks of small dogs. Hospital-issue peignoirs flower into pools of chiffon. Kitten heels in Easter shades and the blood-flecked gauze of bandages lately wrapped around women’s heads, to hold their brains in. Intrauterine devices, tubes of lubricant, compact pots of eyeshadow and spermicide. The hour has passed now for the burying of fallen horses. Winter has stilled the Sunning Terrace. I stand by the sliding doors and stare at the sable mass of the horse carcass lying on its side on blanched astroturf. The wind teases the ratty ends of my wig, the ribbons of my peignoir. The horse’s mane frames her face like a silken wimple. A cut cleaves an opening into her belly. I slip my chilled feet out of the kitten heels, I slither the stockings off, I let the peignoir sail to the plastic grass, I turn the wig over to the wind, I enter headfirst inside the horse. When my eyes adjust to the red darkness of the interior cave I know I am not alone here. Winterlight drips in sheathed cherry as through cathedral windows, warmed by the velour of lung and rumen, the rich vermilion brightening the bodies of women I’ve only seen sitting in their sickrooms, sitting on their sickbeds. A woman touches me. A woman reaches into the breast of another woman and removes a sack of something false and poisonous. A woman draws a coil of plastic tubing from a puncture in my wrist. I take the needles from a woman’s lips. Our fingers speak into swimming skin news of the Revolution our union will breed. The Hospital is not infinite. Our faces slide up into the horseblood; we will be well, we will be well.