June 2009

by Angel Zapata

My blood doesn’t belong to me.
I can open a hole at my wrist
and spray him across the bedroom,
but like a red, wet tentacle
breaking the surface of the ocean,
he must always return below.
The stain lifts from the walls,
curls back from the dresser mirror
and becomes an arm flexing incandescent
from the vein. Bent at the elbow
he slips inside the pockets of my pulse.
Sometimes positive, sometimes negative,
but irrevocably in control, he beats my heart,
creeps out at night as a fine mist of fear
and allows me to hemorrhage through the pain.
He wants me to see that awful look in his eye
when he finally decides to bleed out.

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