quiver whore
The nurse muses:
Residue of athletic prowess lives in different bodies in different ways, sometimes serving as a scrawny testament to years of discipline, other times hiding beneath softening flesh.
When she dismantled her running practice to become a psychic, she found that traces of rush and surge informed the texture of her premonitions.
The pills promised to pacify lines of flight. Lines of flight for which she had no skills.
When he reached for her crotch in the interrogation room, she realized the obvious significance of the metaphor: art and medicine fought within her, locating their battles frequently in the orifice of her mind.
I peered into the abandoned building to find a ghostlight and a solitary figure. The mystique of obedience hung around her frame, ensuring the sophistication of her liveness, even in her choice to rock to and fro, endlessly, scrawling on chalkboard. I prescribed her a new aesthetic, acting as an agent of concern, but after three months of experimentation she fled my witness for the secrecy of trees.
Years later, she shifted the discipline of her mind to the act of burying bones on the hillside. In her newfound intention, years of psychological turbulence fell from her countenance into the tactile act of pressing ribs into soil. The de-skilling of chaos left a haunt in her gaze, but the new acts nourished her, along with the worms.
The specimen they grew on that mountain was illegal, patrolled by helicopters and visits from undercover service members posing as farm volunteers. They hid it slyly with an overgrowth of ferns. In the fall he crushed the dried bud and mixed it into a balm. When she applied it to her hips and thighs, she felt the war paint of immunity: a cellular communion with the bones of the dead. She slipped on a mini skirt, prepared to meet officials at the border.
They begin to spray from planes, poisoning the growth of freedom. Her utopic body trembles with sweat, cum, and decay. Modicums of disobedience course through her blood, offering themselves into the ethers as scribbles of flesh. A dark gray bird of sadness passes her window. Helicopters. She eats another leaf and falls into a corridor of sun. He calls from the museum to inquire about the acquisition of her desire. She feels the knot in her throat tighten as the phone tumbles into a pile of silicone breasts. He dreams of her that night, running through a deep ravine with blood on her face, screaming “this is the new paradigm.” She awakes before nightfall in the secrecy of sheets, realizing the communal swells of their ocean. The nurse asks why I write an archipelago of paranoid hetero poetry and I reveal a bowl of hidden queer pills in the closet. She sips imported coffee and lights a spliff.
We stand bare before the camera, wishing its sterile eye could penetrate the tremor of our inoculated cries.
