a bowl of blackberries

                        affixed to my lap in the doctor’s clinic,
                                    with a leaflet on organ donations,
a kit, and a card of carmine numbers
                        for an unnameable violence.

                                    Their soft bodies split
            between my lips, cellular

                                    and erotically inevitable. A clot, a cluster.

            A quiet mitosis. Grief or genesis,

                                                I couldn’t tell you.

                        Only that the purple liquid moves inside me the way
                                    air pirouettes over water
                                                in the restless
                                    sea, the way breath divides across
                        a field of lungs.


At each throb of sterile white,
                        I think of my professor’s friend
            who died of AIDS at twenty-two.


                                    In the hospital bathroom, the light
                        is asphyxiating. Air congeals against glass.


Feels like I’m in Bluebeard’s forbidden chamber,

                        or in the film Girl, Interrupted, my nude body
                                    razed by a bathtub—itself
            chipped away by the asses of seven suicidal kids.


                        Pressing another one of the berries
            to my mouth, it splits
                        open to years of murdered

                                    wilderness, dark as the root
                        of my own shallow breath.


Behind the thin grey curtain,

            who would want gloved hands touching their pain,
            asking if it feels alright.

                                    I can’t stop smiling, saying it tickles.


            In the Cinema of the Disembodied Mind, I see
                        Life—that coy know-it-all—preparing
                                    to audition for the role of Death
                        in a ballet,

                                    playing dead on stage,
                        until he feels brave
                                    enough to try for the real deal.


            All that practice—

                        yet somehow,
                        he’ll still fuck up his performance
            in the end.


            At least his pointe shoes will be valuable,
                        worn and mottled.


Everything can be repurposed. Even suffering.


                                    The pointe shoe ribbon
                        reincarnated as a typewriter ribbon—
                                    still binding,


            still striking whatever’s left of a life.