Читать книгу My Ariel - Sina Queyras - Страница 16

I was born with a fever. It burned through the first

Six years of my life, burned scarlet, burned all night,

Burned as my mother held me upside down

To the light, jammed two fingers down my throat,

Tossed me up, casting me like a kite. I was thin, lumps

Surfaced and like sorcerers’ stones were cut and cast out,

She was my shepherd, my sight, sang to me as I

Convulsed, spewed milk, sleepless, me at her breast,

A blanche neige, hi-hi-hoing until the morning light.

Years later I was stretched like a banquet on a table,

Hands were laid, women pressed and howled: out, out,

They bid the fever slither, my insides tightening, then,

Light, like a funnel above my head, I felt my body

Rise, unmoor, and my mother’s terror, saying finally,

Stop. And my body snapping back. And the voices

Inside my body, and out: I was their Ouija board, my

Organs turned. My body snapped back into its skin.

In another time I would have been drowned or burned –

Burn – it’s what those without an exit do best.

The addict asleep is her own incendiary device.

Won’t someone light a match? Just one.

The body knows what it needs to burn, and will.