By Madeline Vardell
Rooted at her center life
unmoves but all
around swirling me
shrapnel , branches. Where
ends my dermacasing
I cannot be sure and begin
her thrush wind-pelts.
Her thrush: related to throstle and a small, medium-sized songbird.
An infection of the mouth and throat. Yeastlike. A fungus that causes patches-whitish of the throat. An agitation meaning yeastlike, is a state of turbulence. Inside the mouth turbulence is creative productivity. Men in whitecoats write candidiasis on petridishes in sharpie. An agitation and production, an infection of the female genitals. The vagina and the frog of a horse’s hoof have accumulated a foul dark-smelling perfume.
Saliva-string diagonals across
my face-concern. And it
should make us crotch-itch
when my position veers to the
left of her eye. I am caught
up in moments funneling into
the temporal.
A sharpie marks the oblong dishes rattling along the counter. To die in a state of turbulence, dive down the throat: a whitish infection in-snatches.
Madeline Vardell is an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University and the winner of the 2013 Kay Murphy Prize in Poetry, selected by Lara Glenum. Her poems have recently appeared in Bayou Magazine, Rhino, [PANK], and Whiskey Island. She lives in Mesilla, New Mexico.
