Bad Blood
I will take you home. You will die at least once.
I am barefoot on the altar with zinnias no veil, but unseeing breasts already swollen by your first child, your first gift of blood.
Turkeys will amble past cooling trees hung orange with bittersweet, brown tails rustling the damp stalks of fading zinnias while I throw you down on the hardwood where I once squatted and pulled our son’s waxy head from rice paper cervix while midwives worked their butter soft balls of yarn.
by maggie shoup
Later, what will swell? A bloom crushed into the fat of my motherly arm, purples spreading like the laden sky that loosed a torrent softly, into my wedding dress like you mouth, love like your fist, falling as darkly as the bitter marks of your bad blood. I will ask you to leave. Again. I will ask you to stay. In between, you will gift secret purple jewels around my wrist. Dead daytime drunk, kicking a suitcase crammed with dissatisfaction, claiming the flu, you will fall. You will wake left side slack, foot dragging an eye, stray, lobbing upward like a lost balloon.
The glug glug of your jugular will slow beneath my forefinger not fading as I would have imagined, but choked like an unventilated gas can gasping for air. Your shoulders will bang against the dark dark oak, chest bouncing between breaths. Later, what will swell? A bloom crushed into the white of your sloping cerebellum, purples spreading like the laden sky that loosed a torrent as I pressed my mouth to your slack mouth, love waking you darkly from the bitter sleep of your bad blood.
Your eyes are blue-gray, like a snug Sunday vintage suit. Your eyes are blood red. Your eyes roll backward and you smile. They are time travellers. They visit a joy I cannot see. You are wiggling on a blue plastic gurney as if the click of wheels is the ascent of a very tall roller coaster. The doctor holds, in two stiff fingers quarantined far from his taut lips a snapshot of your cerebellum, soft and rounded studded with tiny gray berries of lesions and fat black lakes of bleeds the remaining slip of your pons a corseted ballerina alone in a dark sea of blood.
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