ANA

I hold it in: that lingering crawl of it

on my tongue, down my esophagus

not yet too strict to permit the stink

of someone’s Italian aroma,

the viscosity of urosepsis:

caught in between

identity, isolation.

I speak of it, sometimes, how it

breathes into itself, a divine spark

fixated on my infinitesimal code that

I wrote as a child, sick

in bed for weeks,

dripping out a kind of cipher to be cited

for the rest of my ailing life, siphoned

like the complications of endocarditis,

like the simplifications of a remarkable

chapter rewrote over the same words

until I have nothing but deep redness:

I leak it out, breathe it in.

I knew from the outset that something

wasn’t quite right, incommunicable

like hydrocephalus might, somehow

like lissencephaly cries

out to me from room nine, pleading

for just a little less wine, for less

of something of which I have

only a little more.