Chronic Nausea

Chronic Nausea
Tim Marshall

I am jealous of the girls

whose carved fingernails curl into fists.

They are God’s girls and have flesh

on their bones, something in their hearts

like church chimes on a bright Sunday –


He was a Christian, a good old

gasoline boy. He jostled over to me,

swaggering and telling of

what layer of hell I could end up in.


Meanwhile my hands thread away at a wood loom:

I weave a girl I wish to be –

I tell him to drown himself in the lake over the hill,

let his bluntness fossilize to be found.


So I wonder why I am gnawing away at toothless gums,

why I am kissing castor oil lips

of a girl that I have only read about

in library sanctioned pages. Where she wouldn’t do this,


the police dig up a body from the water

a few days later. I am not sure if my skin after a shower

looks the same, or when I am bloated

with the pregnancy of a small apple in my stomach.


There’s a graveyard. There’s a hymnal, there’s

a pale girl. She doesn’t know which she should

be asking more of. This is fine,

I tell myself under the shadow of

a bell tower and a steeple.TC mark

Source -> http://last-cabin.xfer.tk/2017/08/chronic-nausea/

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