Spectacle
BY KATHRYN HARGETT-HSU
My vision burned like microfilm, frame to core.
Then it was all shadow & line. That fist
of candy stars scattered across the ER—
that could not be my mind—but I was already
expelling my body from my body.
My body turned inside out, then outside in.
I felt like a bag of blood. I was a bag of blood.
Feeling & being: twin pebbles passed between three shells,
identical & vanishing. Everyone thought what a waste
because I thought what a waste. Oh it was humiliating.
I wanted to be monogamous with my suffering,
to be regarded only by the obsidian eye
of that which devours me. Instead, I made myself a drama
of dry obsessions, my seaweed & my animal parts
spit into the suicide’s scrutinized theater.
There was death. Death was a single-celled organism
reacting to light. It moved towards me
on its slow bristles of cilia, crawled over my face
& continued its journey elsewhere.
