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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