Untitled by C.M. Keehl

I.
Frailty of mortality isn’t what to seek/ isn’t what to wish/ to recount when reality is left scrambling in depths of your clothes trying to predict what you’ll need; if anything at all.

II.
6 hours later & finally I was aware your wearable truth left leaking spinal fluid & fragments/ swollen eyes, a craggy nose the broken pieces spoke penumbras in tangible timelines; told the story that took creator of aesthetics & filled its sight with envoys of procedures that looked inside from a once mouth—unburied red—blood from your head—telling of damage/ from violence from a was that should have not been you.

III.
Pfiesteria & numb lips/ you can’t remember, but that you turned your head/ to smell disaster that left you tangled in timelessness/ in hours/ in surgery connecting IVs to life to death & back again.

IV.
Bed side I sat ghost sat sacred mumblings that exorcises mouths, that keeps me moving to faith-be-reals that hovered bedside vigils.

I was there. No doubt/ no gangs/ this crippling violence could pray me away. I was there even when you weren’t.

C.M. Keehl is a writer, dreamer & destroyer that feels everything at once. She is the poetry editor at Dirty Chai Magazine. Her work has been published & forthcoming in: Great American Lit Mag, Trans Lit Mag, Electric Cereal, Reality Beach & Pigeonholes Mag. She tweets about her amazing dog, Carver, @colleenmkeehl