1.
An eye for your mouth, one for each corner.
A milky eye of mother of pearl, an eye for
style. An eye outfitted with ocular armor.
An eye for an arm. You cost
an arm and an arm. You cost me
both arms.
Fashioned from cloth, I come up
like dough. Yeast is a phoenix,
rebirthing and rebirthing and rebirthing
in warm, dark places. Place in a bowl
and let rise near the stove.
I built this nest of cinnamon and myrrh;
I waited five hundred years
to turn my body into bread.
And I count the noises crickets make
and I count your aspirations on my fingers.
And I count one, two, three, four, five, six
seven, eight, nine, ten, and I calculate,
and I convert kilometers to miles.
I learned to memorize which star is where
and in relation to what. I drew
Punnett squares and learned what chromosomes do.
2.
We grew a brood of fruit flies
in the bottles by the sink. We never
meant to. We went into battle, never
doubting we had a clear advantage.
We had the capacity for strategy.
We had a prefrontal cortex.
We had bait. We had traps. We had vinegar,
and honey, and rum. We were overrun.
Our enemies wore headphones in their bunkers.
They listened to our whispers and they listened
to our codes. Our words were prisoners
of war. Our words were spies.
I bound and gagged each syllable, and I
dressed your throat with my tourniquet mouth.
And I counted to thirty, and heard nothing
and I counted to sixty, and heard nothing
and I counted to one hundred. I gave you numbers
for morphine. I slid them under your skin
so you could sleep. I dabbed at your lips
with a rum-soaked cloth. I watched the oscillations
of your closed eyes.
Dreaming, you counted dead flies.
