qarrtsiluni

Upon autopsy, the neck stump of the parasitic head was shown to contain fragments of bone and tiny vestiges of a heart and lungs.
— www.phreeque.com

I could feel your blood circulating inside me,
knew I was killing you, siphoning off
what you needed for myself,
but how could I have been expected
to do otherwise.

On examination, our skulls are one,
locked together like puzzle pieces,
our craniums stacked and sealed
like bricks laid and mortared
by a bricklayer who’d been drinking.

What has a body, even body fragments,
wants to live, has no choice.
The two-headed snake — its brains
struggling to find food — writhes,
gets nowhere until it dies hungry.

I knew something was going wrong
when your body became pale
as rice paper, your blue veins dried up.
And I could not turn my head
to look you in the eyes.

Video by Donna Kuhn
Poem by Dana Guthrie Martin

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