What’s Going to Kill You
by Jayne Marek
published in Black Horse Review (January 2, 2021)
How secretive it can be, swimming the long courses
of your body’s fluids, nosing against veins and bowels.
Synapses light up as it passes. How you think about it
doesn’t change its intention, whatever the direction
it explores, beating past your eardrums, festering a little
in your alveoli. It’s not urgent, it’s slow to take,
not fixed like thin lilypad goblets in the quotidian pond
of their lives. Think how their roots shift, down in mud
while leaves unroll at the surface, flatten out like hearts.
What’s going to kill you never limits its reach.
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