A mummy’s leggings
from The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats by Mike Giardina
Far from unlovely, she is built like a sunset property,
where southern remedies are brewed and swept
into the swarming London swept backyards.
With thighs like sunsets gone west,
she is a limping mime that frightens me.
How many doctors designed those thighs
and how many physicians did it take for
your mysterious illness to fester?
These days, your drizzles of blood
wakes this dustman’s morning.
With asthma and blood, you walk
to work and look incredible, look
like snow blowing through the door
from any street.
Factories produce to your legs;
they weld bonds, set ankles,
and peal exfoliating steel.
Clowns shuffle nervously.
Troubled children abandon
chalk games to draw your thighs.
That surgeon flooded a vein with his receipts
so you could make sense of your symptoms.
You dabbed coconut remedies to avoid specter
fractures and rubbed it all to forget that melancholy
you think all women need to feel.
You must feel like a mummy
wrapped in your solution of splitting,
in your prayers, your constant drowning,
and this flooding of unknown medicines,
colliding on.
You collide with anywhere these days and look… incredible.
You are flooding into the on, colliding on and on, but
how much do you feel, wrapped up like that, limping on?