OCD Sonnet #1
i’m dying again or at least i’m convinced
my psychologist lists every cancer that has killed me
each tastes like sainthood—honey and xanax—when
stephen died he went with laughing gas all the restless
blue of the world listen i don’t want this poem
easy let it be stripped in the second-floor bathroom
a choreography of lesions like any good martyr
recently it’s tornado footage shaking lens displaced view
please understand no pleasure i’m just afraid to see god
when the funnel hit—years ago—the sky was so dark you
could taste grief might reach for a pinecone or compass
and yes i will mourn this body in more languages
than i care to speak still my mother hears
and forgives the thin violence of honesty.
OCD Sonnet #4
my illness and i will bring separate obituaries
to our funerals one with no mention of highways
the other written only in verbs we haven’t decided
who will die first each arguing for ourselves
i have never authored my illness as “you” but you
are brother and first love fumbling hands
against my thigh tongue-less oracle or the stone
sisyphus never bothered to name breathless desire
suffering a language like canker sores you collect
hospital beds and bathroom doors i catalogue
absence understand completion as compulsion
we are archipelagoed teeth both image and body
a bird startled into flight ravenous for spring.
OCD Sonnet #6
again i sent the text what if i can’t
get off the plane meant to say on but still
this fear of flying of delays of becoming
something winged and what if i am hovering
falling upward with flocks of emergency
flotation devices all these unchecked bags
rising like confession from beneath our seats
how yesterday i told jeeva poetry is the failure
of language or rather a celebration of that
failure a bit too serious for a birthday i know
but at the mexican place off 9th fish were served
eyes intact mouths open to the night—i do not
mean this as a prayer—their spines pulled apart
replaced with crowns of parsley and fruit.
OCD Sonnet #9
i’m still worried about insurance
not a particularly poetic way to start
a sonnet but i’m waiting for a plastic card
to say yes you can pay your therapist
yes you can pay your prescriptions waiting
too is a sonnet precise in its demands
the meter of its minute-hands how it
rushes you to the line’s break folds neatly back
outside the cold has finally set in and i’m
convinced again i’ll be dead by the weekend
dead in my sleep dead on the sidewalk
dead in a strange city searching for any late
bloom of jasmine—i’ve always loved winter
but god i miss the birds.
