Terminal Maladies

for sister sola

Against an invasive tumour flooding the entirety of her body,
she wrestles. The doctor observes, through a biopsy procedure,

the blood assassin stage its operation. Her tissues rigged with leukaemia.
A cankerworm of carcinoma eats the fabric of her skin.

Her eyes, blood-red like coal in a canary. The prognosis for recovery,
a 50-50 life or death chance, to say she ballets

on the knife edge of oblivion. To thaw the cancer cells, the doctor pierces
her skin with a cryoprobe. But they evolve into more resistant

cell-eating cannibals. Her arteries, sickled and drained of their sap
like a pomegranate sliced in half. Such violence

crept up in her body. Call her what she carries. Necrosis. Dyspnoea.
Helicobacter pylori. Cachexia. Merkel cell polyomavirus kneading

her capillaries into a string of knotted vessels. Terror often sings its
tenor. Listen to it attempt to rip the theatre of birds inside her throat.

Pray our bodies do not become meat for everything that has teeth.
Including the air, armed with its fangs.

Dear Lord, there is a spindle of threnodies spooling in our craniums,
save us from the thing that plunders—the voices of wounded angels crying out.