Fall Winter Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine issue six.2

Poetry by Peter Chiykowski

 

Poetry


by Peter Chiykowski
 
 
 

Incommunicable Diseases

 

I.

 

These days she showers alone

and picks her hair

out of the drain

before I can find it.

She looks for patterns

in the shedding

like she’s reading

the dregs of tea.

Oh but the headaches

it gives her, the weight

of water

against her brain.

 

II.

 

He searches the drains

when I finish in the bathroom. He wants

to build a monster

from the pieces I drop,

a sloughed-skin Frankenstein

to curse in the small hours

of should-be sleep.

For now I wear the monster

outside of my body. It sleeps

in our bed, slips

around us like a night sweat,

like a familiar blanket

gone to tatters.

 

III.

 

On the drive to the doctor’s

she points to an elderly man

lining up a left turn

in his Volvo and says

he carries his deaths

with him in the backseat—car

crash, heart failure, aneurysm—odds

that rattle inside his skull

like dice in a cup. To a Belmont

smoker outside our apartment

she gives a house fire,

raw pink and gash red,

the paling dawn

of a chemo patient,

the drip of an IV.

 

She ducks

the rearview, 

the side mirror,

when she gets out the car.

 

IV.

 

He is afraid

that one day he’ll look

and not find me in the sinking

of skin, the slow

landslide

of my posture.

Or maybe he worries

he will recognize

the face of someone

he is too weak

to pull from the rubble.

 

He once told me that God

looks like your father,

but my father was never

an actuary.

 

V.

 

She is hanging a towel

Over the bathroom mirror

when I come up and hold her

as if her body is a bird cage

made of bones. 

She doesn’t pull

away, but her heart

beats itself

into her ribs

like it could break them,

like it could take off

through the jagged gap.

 

I love you,

I say.

 

You always will,

she says, apologizing.

 

VI.

 

I turn into him

and feel my ribs

rising like reefs

out of my body. 

He does not flinch,

but breathes deep and calm,

an ocean

settling its tides.

 

I love you,

he says.

 

You always will,

I say, forgiving him.



–•–


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[Distillate © HA&L + Peter Chiykowski |  {from the Greek bios} - the course of a life.]

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