Stain for CD117
it's my mast cells,
I will say, as underneath
the flushed skin my blood
bubbles & boils & churns,
the acid eroding my stomach
lining rises and chokes me
as my anger flares: my body
firing on all cylinders in distress -
the messily stitched-together
interweaving of a lived
experience with cells gone awry:
I want an autonomy I cannot
claim - and I channel it toward
my knowledge of the chemical
reactions in the cells that they
saw under microscope as
abnormal, hidden until the dye
brought them into the harsh
light of the clinical gaze, finally -
this I can understand and explain,
I can educate the way the trigger
works because what I have to
avoid is the buried part of me
that I know is angry with cause,
that I rein in, tame, smooth out,
make palatable, relatable,
shape into something that
people will read, nodding to
themselves, a rational frustration -
to keep what I view as a monster
from consuming me, even
though the monstrosity is the horror
of so many hours I have seen,
swallowed, agonized, cried, I
restrain myself so they will not
restrain me, they will not hear me:
fuck you, you did not believe me,
you saw me suffer and you filed
me away in a drawer under hysterical;
fuck you, you harmed me, the snake
on the rod of Asclepius should strangle
you until you feel the panic rise
within and set your whole body alight -
and that's your mast cells.
mister hypoglycemic mage
the ash of a tongue set aflame
a sparkle click chanting words
glossolalia in eight different mouths
the sight of a thousand in the eyes of a few
(a picture is worth a thousand words)
at the top of a mountain in sepharimic outline
silhouetted by the flames licking hellbent on his robes
a black hole for a gaping mouth and the pit-eyes of a corpse
is your savior decaying on pounds of moss
a skeletal sort of nightmare
phantasmagoric from a realm unseemly
and his prophecy you listen in rapt awe
like a thousand dying maggots
sucking off the last scraps of flesh
from the whittled dog bones
in some sort of language depraved
"i have seen the sinners and the saints
both gnawing on the flesh of their elders,
roasting their young on spits in a smoky sort of serenade
a blood-christening rising on the early morning dew
wrinkled guts in heaps as they glut themselves"
in the coal-black whisper of midnight
"i have seen these sinners and saints
and they are just a simple mirror
as they gaze into the eyes of each other"
Sarah Klein is a queer disabled writer whose poetry has previously appeared in fifth wheel press, Coffin Bell, the Jewish Literary Journal and others. She currently resides in Boston and her other passions include social justice and her two black cats.