200words.

That I’d need a whole bathtub of Bactine to quell the irritation: as
in my limbs when they make full contact with a jagger bush, or a
fistful of down gets blown in my eye.

*

Because there is no one place in my body that misses them. Rather, the whole system of me, in reaction, set of systems of me, in concert, noticing suddenly the off-note, swollen region, localized effect. Sum total of diagnosing someone amiss, absent, dead.

What triggers this inflammation. Cellular menace. Puts into motion the operations that move cilia, corpuscles, on cue, to my insides,
reddened and unstable. All these errands of immunity.

*

[I am trying to show you that the longing is corporeal. But words get thinky instead. What part of the body produces the language and as it does so, sets it at a remove?]

*

Everywhere shadows of them connect to my body: the sore heat of grief.

*

Is a fever never breaking.
Is an unsuccessful seance in the blood.
Is the lonely section of our organism.
Is a rash spreading to places I cannot reach.
Is reproducing the warmth but only as a weapon.

Are arms, opening toward empty woods.

Deluth - The day started out like any other in this
smoky mountain town as Patrice Maynard sat down to
teach long division to her second grade class.
Maynard, a psychiatrist researching the effects of
color therapy on cognitive development, received an
unexpected answer to a relatively simple question. The
student, Ronald McArthur, surmised that 50,000 modulus
476 was equal to 31.0001. The decimal portion,
McArthur concluded, was the result of “an evolutionary
mutation subjecting itself to Darwinian Pressure in
order to validate its purpose and identity.”

“It would have been laughable had it not happened so
many times in a single day,” remarked Kyle Rosenthal,
the school’s assistant principal. By noon that
Thursday Rosenthal had disciplined 27 other students
for similar pseudoscience-inspired disruptions.

School board-appointed investigators looking into the
happening remarked that “only a few” other cases were
reported regionally, presumably not enough to account
for the national explosion of cases reported the very
next day. “Similar to 1999’s Melissa virus, which
crashed email servers globally and cost businesses
millions of dollars in productivity-related loses,
these students’ actions amounted to a Denial Of
(disciplinary) Service, as administrators, dutifully,
spent hours parsing through the pithy issues of faith,
biology, and mathematics.”

A shift in the weather brings it on.

The nights become a little colder. The wind starts to bite, making
cheeks pink.

It starts small - a few balls of color and fiber sitting in the
corner. The sound of clicking needles and the inevitability of more
and more projects being started causes the balls of yarn to multiply
and multiply. Patterns and pictures of items that I want to create
fill my mind and in time the corner basket starts to overflow with a
plethora of soft grays, fuzzy blues, smooth cords of green. What
starts as small and inconsequential begins to fill the quiet
spaces-needles are in hand upon coming home from work, needles are in
hand while sitting in a room filled with five or so other people,
needles are in hand while in the passenger seat on a car trip three
hours long.

At some point the pile of yarn is replaced by hats, scarves, blankets,
and partially finished sweaters (most of which find their way to those
who’ve witnessed the mania first hand). My interest wanes as the sun
starts to shine and warm woolen things are no longer desired.

Six months of idle hands.

I came out at thanksgiving. mom wanted to go to church for christmas. she wept “why can’t we worship as a family?” it was a televised affair in the suburbs. she promised a pageant with a cast of 200. What there was was a squat man in a suit, behind a pew in front of an american flag the size of a billboard. he proclaimed the righteousness of the way and condemned environmentalists, blasphemers, homosexuals and arabs. all rose for the pledge. when i did not stand, a couple laid hands on me and prayed to bear
witness. they showed pictures of what heaven was like. everyone was white and gathered at the feet of the lord. everlasting life. i looked around at the hands raised to the air and the crying woman crawling in the aisle towards the altar. I truly tried to catch the spirit. i thought, I am 18 and 18,000 adult, enraptured believers are totally into this. i could not accept that so could have false consciousness. i thought, i am an asshole. i waited outside in the vast parking lot. my mother never made me go to church again.

You only need to ask me once to see the stump that was my index finger. It was all chewed up in an accident when I was a little boy. After all, it’s not like I can hide it.

You might have to ask me twice and buy me a beer for me to lift up my shirt and show you how the cirrhosis swelled one side of my belly. You can pretty much see it on the outside of my clothes but it’s even better when you see the flesh up close.

You will definitely have to ask me three times, and maybe buy me one more beer, for me to take off my shoe, pull off my sock, and show you what is left of my toes. I had started to pick the scabs but it doesn’t hurt much, not like before.

And if you are lucky, and ask very nicely, and perhaps buy me one more round, I will roll up my pant leg, maybe a little too high so that you start to feel a little queasy, and let you see the red ribbons that are climbing up my leg, to where you don’t want to see, but you know where they go, and you have to buy us yet one more round to forget.