Ache

Tue, 04/04/2017 - 20:04 -- HRKang

November 9, 2016, 00:00, you open nytimes .com
and the American map glaring back at you
is red,
like Muslim blood, like Mexican blood, like American blood.

 

First, you realize you can taste your stomach in your throat.
Your insides start to twist
and contort into metal vines clinging to the walls of your abdomen
whose roots fall into hissing acid that
eats away at your flesh and
with the rise of the tide
forcefully kisses the back of your tongue.

 

Next, you discover the sensation of your head bursting with bees.
Hot repressed tears dig
into the backs of your eye sockets and
crystalize into glass needles whose glass wings carry them
upwards through tender gray matter
to the top of your skull where they emerge from clear chrysalis into
yellow black drops of ocean buzzing to get out.

 

Then you learn what it's like to have your heart spill over.
At first it feels like
someone's cracked a hole in your ribcage and air is blowing through
then the pressure widens the crack and
like a bulldozed dam
a flood of hot pulsating red blood
pools out of your chest in a broken current.

This poem is about: 
Me
My country
Our world

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