Leslie Contreras Schwartz
NIGHT ROOST
The body talks to herself in dead-of-night, grooms
carefully like a cat, licking the furry and blue-tinged spirit
into agreement:
Tomorrow you will not walk.
You will lose walking and lifting.
You will wake up choking.
The old one, laid out on the bed like a slash in the sweaty sheets
puts her gaunt face in the hands of the girl:
the one secreted inside with a handful of soft fat
and collagen plump, gardenia lipped days.
She plucks the old eyes, black
grapes, eats skein then pulp.
You have to fold body parts to get to the purpling
-inside skin, into the slick baby face. Behind her thighs are feet,
then legs, pickled in formaldehyde.
I love you so
and so, she tells the other,
the elder running
from her lips.
Together they eat their own origami heartbeats.
Together they edge and crease, googol-fold.
Pressed, creased, made one with a hard-line turn:
body the tool, the pattern-maker, reaching inside
this many-inhabited place of herself and herself,
multiplied to a million ones.
Handsome now slipped inside
one another. Neatly folded,
and swallowed whole.
Fully formed, now down they go
through impassable
vines,
using body as rope
into subterrane—
Here they hang
upside down,
bat wings curled
around one
another.
Night dosing, the roost
steams the cave,
their guano a precious
snow flurry.
Mother claw, gripping.
The wrestle against
bone’s barbed wire.
Holding off its slice
of the spirit.
This rough twisting
of feeble
into prism.
Yes, the vitality—
the watertight
selfhood
resistant to crush.
All this: to get through a day
in the mind with an unwell body.