Jax Peters Lowell
Orange metal flake skin
in thin blue highways of vein and vessel,
ten deep their tumult
swift flash, beating air.
She is full of their breath, bravura, dare,
songs of deep, cold rivers, the silver treachery
of rocks. Asleep, she is the precipice
from which they leap.
The ventricles kick in,
her heart’s steady bump, swish
a chant, an incantation,
for these fevered, egg-swollen fish.
A cheer goes up on the scaffold of her bones,
axons spark along the muscle’s telephones.
Nerves whisper sympathetically,
Almost there! Almost there!
Up the blood wild carotid, down
that tiny circular stair -- all crash, collide, greed.
A final dash, tympanic chamber stretched to bursting,
all blind with fatted need.
In tangled sheets of morning, she rests
slightly clammy, swell of belly and breast.
Under her pillow, a drop of golden lymph
washes her childless soul clean.
