Zarxio: Injection

Most of what I feel is my imagination.

Marrow thin as a minnow, tired as winter.

The wild blue of neutrophils

dwindling like a stand of harebell

in a frosted-over field. My veins are ferrous

and inhospitable. A motley coagulation of cells

refuses to carry oxygen up these hills.

Nosebleeds, nightly, bead on my upper lip

like a line of rubies. I imagine me magnificent, bejeweled.

The needle itself is nothing—thin, refrigerated.

The nurse presses a bandage to the wound, barely there.

I blush like a debutante—rose on the cheek, the chest,

the left breast that looks like worry. But mostly,

it’s bone ache that comes. The body I’m afraid to be

alone with. The naïve bone that makes itself better

so it can be broken down. Ribs turn violet,

violent, a heat that holds me. The sacrum beats

its elegant white heart through the night.

Right distal radius, right tibia—old hurts return, sharpen.

How does one body remember so much?