pee as a measure

of health. Now,

you too forget

what is inside & what

is designed to be outside, forget

what is fluid & what is pain. Your brain is a dark bird

without a name. Except we can call it grade 4 glioma

and we can deliver you 4 mg decadron as a hope

nothing else will explode. You think

of scarlet anthills, how clear rains ravage

obstinance, bodies

as brittle. You touch

radiation as if it were a branch of the epiphyte outside your bay

window. If you touch it, on this branch, you can grow: you can draw

nutrients from a soilless space, clamp down as a moth orchid, hang roots, absorb

downpour. You slide

from an MRI machine to a new immunotherapy. “Maybe you should be less

ambitious,” your mother says. And

you agree. Maybe you should

have been some girl at some

tiny arcade, cupping the last

skeeball before the cool kids

arrived. Then

you could recall

how the hand feels
with too many silver coins, luck

coursing through each thumb.

You want to say all this but a woodpecker is at your leg. You want

to say, STOP. Your tongue, part ice-
spoke, part

soliloquy.

Before you lose the other side of speech, where a syllable

cannot repair a sound— hum. Find a new way

to burst. Rain is caressing

the window

and we’re ready

for sleep. You want to say, wake up. It’s

over. Yesterday a baby

shower, tomorrow a new biopsy. You imagine

sunshine swollen on Rockaway Beach, your own

parasite turned parasitic, your will

to explosion. You collect selves

at an ocean, wonder

how many have peed

in these cold waters.

Here,

you wish for an experience to share

as your right side remembers even

when the left is no longer left.

You too are a dead star near

rejoining. You too are a way

for the universe to experience itself.

Release into the ocean. Drink.

You never promised to stay.