Reproductive Doctor

Enclosed in each prescribing mouth is an eternal fire of authority. Patients must wear protective clothing and well-insulated masks against the sparks. It is difficult to fit inside the suit because the body is an ill-used paintbrush, her mural based on a series of small diurnal deaths. Am I already or am I not? we may ask each morning. Yes, I do hear the pattering of small voices in low volume, even extensive monologues, in between sleeps. Was there an event that precipitated this psycho disorder? the reproductive doctor asks. To stall for time and to measure the effects of his ignorance, I sift water through a mirror and gain a puddle that will grow into a lake by the time this conversation is over. The snake belongs to science, the healing herbs to Hildegard. There was a rape but I was never healed. Someone arranges the pink roses around my birth canal. Someone lights a candle that smells of cinnamon. I sought this consultation because there have been four miscarriages. But who performed the rape? the doctor asks. A rape is an ordinary medical procedure, it seems. I was wrong. I must have been one of the diurnal casualties yesterday because now my skin has burst through with thorns; my arms bear the weight of their full foliage. And some mourner has planted ornaments around my labia, pastel shapeless birds that never made it past the nest. At this point, even the doctor’s grinning teeth are flowering pubic hair.

The Sperm of God

The semen of God is on its way. Do you trust in it to erect a flower? A lily of the valley, return to the glycosides of happiness. What else stimulates his heart like a furrow of new organisms? To fashion an angel’s trumpet, a monk’s hood as he swills our lady’s tears. They say to us we must grow up, but do you trust in God’s hemlock milk as you trust in the presence of the swan steering the great glass river? Swans regulate their silver milk like other animals, like the water of tomorrow. There beside the river stands an iron gate, and beside the wet gate is a woman who comes daily to draw pictograms with her little finger in the moisture and to release from her canvas bag a heap of rattling words jostling to be the first to fly out. Some flop on the river’s face and float along to the next town in a daze. Few learn to fly. Others crash down on the great iron tracks. And some perch atop the rail and stare into the woman’s mouth, thinking of gaining entrance from the gatekeeper. Below, the swans soothe the water and cry out to each other or the passing trees. One pecks a squirming black letter in her dark beak, all the legs of sounds dangling. In its solitude, water is the cure for loneliness, for everything. Nothing, says God. But he rubs away the dirt and nightshades from his non-body in water and teaches that only his sperm is pure, and therefore his son alone is clean and good.