My Blood Flow Runs in Reverse
By Sabra Embury
Ballistics, in the art of accelerating projectiles, make me hot for
you. That, and peripheral light cones with their tapered plastic
gleaming reflective tape on roadsides.
While blur-faced suits, with their leather whisps of scent, punch my
lungs en-route-to-bagel bliss, past trashy sidewalks.
Sometimes when it rains, and I am wet all over with no umbrella.
Soaked through my stacked bones, and skin, I send you texts saying I
miss you all over and inside of me and my blood flow runs in reverse,
right outside of my brain.
In Chinese place on Monday, around dinnertime, a cook walked over to
the giant gray trash bin, held one nostril, blew out the contents of
his head, then switched, and the expulsion was complete. He seemed to
know what he was doing.
After cringing, staring at my feet from such abrupt purging, I
attempted the same maneuver in my mind, failed miserably with stunned
eyes judging; needed some napkin or tissue; then couldn't get out of
my head all over again.
At home, old brown cords over the bathroom door hook reak of puddled street wine, wales weighing a million tons by that one breezy window
cracked for long showers.
"Ain't That America" seeps through the screen from a speaker through a
rattling on some submerged curb somewhere, and I am not that hungry
for my Moo Shu pork anymore.
I sleep, and so often tread floods, while I'm dreaming. Zeppelin'd
children disarming solar space rays in the sky, pixeled cheetahs
skimming sodium tides on fins and claws like lightning.
Blow-up Geishas flow and pass through plagues of floods in waves of
fate, in petrified gazes of O. And you are beside me, wrapped in a
pool noodle, bobbing, smiling and asking me: how are you?