Juno Heidbreder
Jon Tribble Award Winner
A fever cooks you alive.
In an attempt to eradicate a foreign enemy,
It heats your body.
Melting your brain
Killing you slowly.
Like a frog in a
Boiling
Pot.
A speck of grit finds home under your skin.
Unnoticed, it freely swells into a hideous pearl.
If nor caught by stage four,
Its opalescence spreads till all flesh is nacre.
Watch as your body solidifies and turns cold.
A death that started long before your heart stopped beating.
This newspaper was sitting out on our lawn:
“The Civil War Enters its third year today.
Casualties continue to climb as many fall by the hands of their own brother.
There is no sign of a truce,
and with the nurses and doctors during their weapons against us,
it is unclear what will become of the nervous system.
Many fear that this conflict will last until there is nothing left of our nation.
The latest message from our implacable immune system foes reads as follows:
‘Cut the spinal court open.
Line up the nerves for tonight’s firing squad.
A myelin sheath massacre.
There is no mercy,
No surrender,
Nothing will be left in this salted earth.'”
The following night this was broadcasted over the radio:
“Breaking News: An atom bomb went off earlier today,
this time hitting the optic nerve.
This marks the fifth and latest attack on our great nation
With no sign of ceasefire, it’s recommended that everyone stay on high alert seek shelter, and
far the skies until the end of time.”
I can’t take it anymore so I change the channel:
“I have had a vision!
That raging train of change,
Its church organ whistle breaking through the countryside.
A lethal cargo tucked away in my left leg
And rising after a long day of travel
The clot begins its pilgrimage across the femoral artery,
A spiritual journey to the lungs,
So it may pray to the god of suffocation
And pray to the god of embolism
Cough now
Cough and choke on your own life blood
For your day of reckoning has arrived.”
I turn off the radio and go outside.
The algae waits impatiently at the edges of the reservoir.
One warm day and it will bloom,
Its poison reaching a white dead hand into the taps.
Sick and dying,
The locals’ coughed up blood will cover the crosswalk.
Black stains blending into the black tar.
And I know that bile that rises up from their stomach
And out through their mouth,
Also resides in me.
Lying in wait.
Whether by foreign entity
or its own self inflicted fate,
this shell will break and fall away.
Skin melting into earth
Bone ground down by erosion
Blood returning to ocean
Into a new
Boiling
Pot