You Again

Again you hold a mirror up to the mouth, again you knock
on the wood of the head to call the druids out. As a body sickens
it forgets its beginnings, forgets how it’s gone on for so long,
feels limbless and strange and starless, smudges in photographs.
Hum-drunk whistling from the sickening body, one same stale song.
The sickening body sucks sugar water like a hummingbird,
spills out like a thermos. Visions seep through the pores
of the sickening body, hot-box in the sterile one-windowed room.

The sickening body is less like the body and more like the sky.
Sky aflame, then white and clotted with rain. A vision of lifting
through clouds bled pink in the smoking dawn. Fever-face—
you tongue that vision. You know you don’t just have to try.
You know you have to try everything. Sometimes you try so hard
it scares you, all tender-handed and lambent, holding his head
like a bomb disposal expert. You spend hours on the internet,
spend hours on your own, spend hours like a billionaire of time,
run eight miles like it’s nothing, hold a prayer for ransom,
try simony, trading in sacred things to keep this trying from ending—

keep the sickening body from smudging in photographs,
from dreaming itself as the body once was. If the trying ends,
either the sickening ends or the body does. The nights slow
and stop at certain moments like stations, engines broken.
Breath of the sickening body catching in the crook of your finger,
dangling shining and gasping from the swinging fishhook
of its somatic misunderstanding. How the days have no edges
and the visions keep coming. O Vision—lift me like a soda can
in a wind tunnel, lift me like a little finger. How the face closes
like shutters and how, like summer, the cheeks cave in.
You hold him between your temples, see him in everything.

Isabelle Doyle’s poems can be found in Bluestem Magazine, Typo Magazine, Map Literary, The Red Eft Review, The Blue Pencil Online, Cargoes, Street Light Press, Thin Noon, The Round, and Clerestory. Her poetry manuscript “BABYFACE” was the 2018 recipient of the Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University. Her poetry manuscript “O'Riley” was a semifinalist in the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize.