Must a Violence

17-Year Diagnosis

52 17-Year Diagnosis I photograph myself beneath a street sign indicating an evacuation route. I collect dehydrated foods for the emergency kit. I disperse the remaining marigold seeds over a plot of unlikely dirt. “I dare you!” I shout to the distant officer. Am I not meant to achieve what others cannot? I deprive myself of an adequate serving. I refuse all compensation. I relinquish my significant lead. I quietly close and put away the dictionary and thesaurus. I crouch under the giant bush rubbing wet clay over my face. Am I meant to medicate myself down to a pincushion of vibrating needles? My eyes peer out, guilty. I think back on the hibernating ladybugs cloistered inside the cement tower rising from the abandoned hill. Masses of faded red bodies 53 piled up on one another like a mountain of pills waiting to be shuttled into bottles, portioned out in dosages, swallowed by a “patient,” or, that person with a desperate wish to change, exchange their molecules or un-derange— “Patient,” an electric humming of collaborating complacencies. And then when summer came, over-ripened, the swarming cicadas formed an inescapable grid in the air. All the buoyant, buzzing bodies. A pinball machine of ideas, and the will ricocheting from one elastic possibility to the next, racking up collision points before dropping exhausted through an unseen hole in the floor, trapdoor, just one loose cranial plate and a bottomless drop beneath. The un-medicated beating of wings. They festered over plants and trees and rocks. They crawled unbidden from the ground with implacable, unreadable eyes, red and opaque, a hooked leg bent into the bark. Am I only led 54 by the particular tint of my vision? The sustained pulse folding thicker to a shriek. Time-lapse release. Husks of bodies clawed onto the trees, each back split open where a new, whole life emerged. Is it so unfair to surge ahead, with the speed built into the body? An aberration, an adaptation? Will you recognize me by my face? The filmy carapace just bursting at the seams? I’ll beat my new wet wings against a fern. ...