Melissa Prunty Kemp

Hand me that bottle of Excedrin

they’re giving me a headache again

the tumors in my head

have been there like the AIDS virus

since I was fifteen

I actually lived fifteen years

without dying    sometimes they pulse

feel like they’re expanding throbbing dicks

hot blood coursing their veins

they’re  g-strings around my red/white blood cells

choking the life out of me    like a thong up my ass

as I lay here and wonder how  I got here

I used to weave garlands out of bee balm

and measure my hair

against my girlfriend’s plaits everyday

to see whose was longer

and get felt up behind the house

next to the lilac shrub    

felt that burning wanting

not like the searing thrusting

that shot a million poison missiles into

my womb     stream    blood of life

the tumors rearrange  rotate

like DNA they replicate themselves multiply

with each throb of pain pulsing

I can see myself through a gauze veil

I see Shirley who is marrying

the man she took from me

she slipped him away from me

the one with the thrusting    searing

will her seed prove stronger than HIV  

maybe she’ll be the first human on earth 

to refuse to replicate the codes 

that makes your body hallucinate    

it must be trippin’ because it thinks 

its an enemy and must kill itself

it causes tumors like the ones in my head

 

Published in Art & Understanding Magazine , 37, 1997.