My half-eaten apple falls onto the carpet and I yell:
This is me now, perpetually, the sound of a knife dicing
echoing from the dim kitchen down the hall:
A moldy seed I’ve swallowed and coughed up and then
swallowed again, the seed germinating into a black cactus
pressing against my trachea as I speak, as in a robbery
with my own hands circling my neck, blade pressed firm:
Yes this is a threat because with this disease tomorrow
is always harder. When swallowing smoke is no longer
an option. Instead, the necessary medicine is
sitting at the counter with my son at seven in his
stretched Pikachu jams, ankles showing while he paints
a little ceramic bear he got in his Halloween haul.
Husky sitting obediently beside him. Blue and purple
on his fingertips. Makes me think about how if
I draw enough triangles, and connect them,
they’ll make a hexagon. Later, I think about Uno cards
incinerating in my hands. Specs of paint
on my son’s face as we play. He is smiling but also
becoming the bear tonight and I wonder if that bear
will become brimstone when I dream of hornets and
first-degree burns. I want to get the paint off his face
but my hands are always in fists. And the rays on my
drawn suns are irregular, stunted, but there’s one
that goes off the page, long beyond the messy Uno deck,
off the table, down to the carpet where the apple fell earlier
and I spent all afternoon on my knees, picking off
little pieces of dog hair, hungry, crying hard.