We know so little about the body. We know so little about anything. What’s really causing that pain in my arm? A scrap of left-over chickenpox that I’ve shared my body with for forty years? Really?
Have you accepted Shingles as your personal savior?
Shingles is not the savior. Shingles is the prophet, the voice crying out in the wilderness. Shingles is a necessary storm, preparing in the forest a way for the Lord. If trees are falling, it’s because they’re ready. They’ve been waiting for this. I see them and hear them. They’re really falling.
Now it is time for body and soul to write the song of itchy scabs. Unbearable fizzling carbonation under a steaming crust, transforming the ache into a new surface to meet the world.
It feels like there should be feathers growing in, shocking as a first pubic hair.
I dreamed I was pregnant with screams, but no: it was a nestful of broken sparrows, their wings the torn-off pages of calendars.
also: 