Andrew Kozma

A FEVER BREAKING

Grieving is a fever, and when it breaks you shiver
in a new skin. The rawness of the air. The silencing pain

of walking on uncalloused feet. And the hunger,
the lucid hunger which makes you an empty box

unfillable. Grief is an endless field of wheat
slowly burning under the unforgivable sun. And fever

is the burning of your body, a slow turning
like a caught fish strung up

in the gentlest breeze, a desiccating breath
of sour, swamp-scented air. The fever is a summer-

baked sidewalk, a concrete city stewed in itself,
a pot so long on the burner the bottom melts clean away.

Grief passes, they say, as a fever passes, but inside
there is no clock, no timer, just a delusion of eternity

unending now ended. These aches and groans,
these muscle-spasmed broken bones, this flesh

too sensitive to be comforted with a touch, this brain
boiling in the sealed jar of your skull, this heart

a broken drum, these lungs a rusty turbine, this blood
only blood, too much of it, just coppery slag pooling

in your tongue-staunched mouth. The fever never
breaks. You crack and shatter. You let yourself out.