A mummy’s leggings
Far from unlovely, she is built like a sunset property,
where southern remedies are brewed and swept
into the swarming London swept backyards.
With thighs like sunsets gone west,
she is a limping mime that frightens me.
How many doctors designed those thighs
and how many physicians did it take for
your mysterious illness to fester?
These days, your drizzles of blood
wakes this dustman’s morning.
With asthma and blood, you walk
to work and look incredible, look
like snow blowing through the door
from any street.
Factories produce to your legs;
they weld bonds, set ankles,
and peal exfoliating steel.
Clowns shuffle nervously.
Troubled children abandon
chalk games to draw your thighs.
That surgeon flooded a vein with his receipts
so you could make sense of your symptoms.
You dabbed coconut remedies to avoid specter
fractures and rubbed it all to forget that melancholy
you think all women need to feel.
You must feel like a mummy
wrapped in your solution of splitting,
in your prayers, your constant drowning,
and this flooding of unknown medicines,
colliding on.
You collide with anywhere these days and look… incredible.
You are flooding into the on, colliding on and on, but
how much do you feel, wrapped up like that, limping on?
This poem originally appeared in The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats, an anthology of poetry written by Mike Giardina. The complete the anthology is available below:
Table of contents:
- Sun Shine Body
- On arrival in a lot of no civilization and plenty of letters,
- The unable to deliver
- An upwards slanted walk
- A familiar voice
- Those who have a standard way of going
- Left each chapter within us
- Warm smile not found in her cigarette
- To regain his composure for figures
- Food for rejecting his feet
- Even during--even if it during
- Lying on the floor, stretched after stir
- A soldier frames the wall
- A step by boulder
- A train by life station
- I was able to take the old north of town
- Fledgling
- Job
- Bradbury's closet
- A mummy's leggings
- Sipping mother's sweat
- Flash like an individual there
- I realize the skyline while playing catch with mother's death
- Running far away from a city, to return a week later
- Dysmorphexia
- Carried the clock over
- We have been meeting years
- Chocolate Italian princess
- Champion of Years
- "How much longer will I be able to remount the mothproof thrusting..."
- Over as rivers are over