poems from
Host
Pastorale
Distances
destroy the hungry.
Heat-sensitive worms
drift into the ganglia, the entangled languages
and lock your
mouth in place.
You sing this
song forever.
The sheep
return to the meadow, in the morning sunlight,
and eat the slicked
grasses, plus the locked-on ants
and inside the
sheep the worms mate and die
and their eggs
drift through the bile ducts
through the
body’s grease and slippage
and also exit,
scattered in the droppings,
which a snail, Cochlicopa lubrica, feeds upon.
Could we do
this again
If we had to?
Inside, the
eggs hatch and the larvae head straight to the genitals
and castrate
the snail.
Some exit the
snail in gobs of mucous,
which the ants follow
and eat and are infected once more.
And so we climb
again into the sunlight, which
is still
there. And comes from such a long ways
away.
Dysregulation
Perhaps this is not the time to tell you about Toxoplasma.
That’s because
you probably have Toxoplasma
machinery at
work in your brain.
Most people do.
And Toxoplasma has no interest in hearing
about itself.
It has no
interest in the blunt instruments of metaphor.
It hides within
your cells and secretes a heat-sensitive factor
that disrupts
cell division.
It makes
precisely 128 copies before it spills out of
whatever cell
has been holding it and the phages can attack it.
But some always survive.
All of this
activity can modify your behavior.
It can make you
more aggressive or prone to risk.
It could make
you more affectionate towards your cat
which is Toxoplasma’s final host.
Cells always
die. The cat curls on your lap
with all of its
regulations..
Lobatostoma
I am all receptor.
And I’m done with receiving.
In the tunnels and caves
I fought your loneliness
I fought your grief
I had eyes once
but they’re gone now
I dipped my words
in the drip of your body.
I dipped them in the moonlight
I could not see.
I am all survival.
My ciliary tufts.
My flame cells.
The whispered stars
come out as usual
and offer nothing
but more light.
Buccal
650 species of bacteria in the oral cavity alone
in the gingival sulcus, in the periodontal
pocket
all those parts of the mouth
you never claimed to know
on the tip of my tongue
Stratum Corneum
How many layers of skin do you need between your toes?
Where the larval form of Strongyloides makes
its first contact
and applying its proteins to the edge of
you, your lipids and migrating cells
All of the borders are closed. The crawl rate
of those that move
almost
zero.
the over-edible
body surrounded by its teguments
and still, there is a distance at the heart of all
flesh
through
which the narrowest creatures arrive
through
sheet after sheet of keratin and cholesterol
and into your bloodstream and then to your lungs, and
when
in your mouth so you swallow them back down
off the flow in your intestines.
Almost twenty – that’s the answer you’re looking for.
All there to protect you, but not to keep you pure
until they reach maturity and shed all their eggs
for the homeless, the strung out
and never
enough to do either.
