cachexia gardens
most of the time we hate the way you make us sick with those
words contained in the glass jars, the sun shining through
the translucent sap, in so many hues of green and yellow.
kept the illness bottled up and put it on display
why not just shove it in their face, put it up under a glass
case in a museum and charge and arm and a leg to get
yourself contaminated. feeling like you could be back
home on the farm dying a little in the rotting fields of
unharvested vegtables long since ripe and now splitting their
bellies with sore thumbs and burgeoning vines spill out
tangling on the posts and growing sweet in the ferment moon.
planted in a garden that smells like a tomb, a visceral stalk
lifting to the clouds, sucking out whatever moisture it can,
but only swallows the mouthfuls of static.
how is anything supposed to grow like this?
how can anything grow in a world like this?
all down these stomach walls the acid burns and a scorched earth
is all that's left, her pretty face a mask of the taught skin
over plastic bones. strung out through the rows and finally
distended through the empty sucking, puncturing the surface
of atrophied flesh, piercing the the way it used to be a novelty,
to be just like that replicant pile of waste over flowing
in gluttonous containers.