Write This (Death is blood seeping …)
— after Michael Palmer
Write this. Death is blood seeping through a stoma, pooling in a colostomy bag. It’s no food and no water, cancer’s game of coconut shells. Under the first shell, starvation. Under the second, asphyxiation. Under the third, exsanguination. Death is years or months or days or hours or minutes or seconds on this earth then no more.
Write this. The hydra plants its foot underwater while its tentacle-ringed mouth catches water fleas. Brainless, it moves, sleeps, eats.
Write this because this has been written. Women are observed frailties, hissing winds, starless defects. He who holds the lamp is the sun. He who fathers the sky is the ghost. The Earth is a punishment, a death. She who is redundant is simple, her one purpose to bring filth to the world.
Write this. We hum while time passes to a tune we barely remember, one sung in dusty kitchens with nicotine-stained walls.
Write this. They buried the burned boys in an unmarked grave. They buried the marred boys with no names. They buried the boys who would never marry. They buried the boys they could barely carry. They buried the boys before their families came. (Only one family ever came.) They buried the boys who burned in the ward in the hospital in the town where the insane were housed. They buried forty boys. They buried forty boys. It was 1918. It was my hometown. Forty boys burned. They dug one grave.
Write this. You show me a painting and call it a photograph. You show me a photograph and call it a memory. You show me a memory and call it a delusion. You show me a delusion and call it evidence of God. You never show me God. Show me.
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in a variety of literary publications, including The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, FRiGG, New Letters, and SWWIM. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Martin was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, and currently lives in Toquerville, Utah.
