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Archaic Torso of Me Too
There was the guy in the next room
screaming he wanted some goddamn sugar.
There was the lady who my first night
conscious tried to get me to pray while
a falcon-headed shade carried off
my biowaste, hexes welting the walls—
she was also a hallucination. How
I was strapped to the face of a sundial,
names of drugs like archangels,
the breathing machine pulling in
an Army-Navy game and tolling
like Big Ben. Hovering beside me,
another me entirely free of pain
like the idea of a rainbow beside
a fading rainbow. Huff of alcohol,
fentanyl, urine, red beets. The one
I made leave because he couldn’t stop
acting triumphant. It wasn’t only death
in costume. But always there was my darling
who’d kiss me even though the pulse-spike
would bring nurses running.
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Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, the very place that Coleridge and Southey were thinking of founding their commune. Maybe. He is also maybe currently living in Cincinnati where he is trying to fit a two-bedroom house into a loft apartment. His, hopefully next book, completing his IT’S ALIVE!! Trilogy, Creature Feature is almost finished. Then from there on in it’s all petal drop blast radius.
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Saint Elizabeth of Hungary bringing food for the inmates of a hospital. Oil painting by Adam Elsheimer, ca. 1598
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Author: Terence Winch
