The farmhouse was strung in corpse vine,

the kitchen full of dead bodies.

Animal protein at every meal will stabilize

your cortisol levels, the facilitator chirped.

I sheafed my shedding hair

and burnt it on the bonfire.

In the garden, roots were rotting

after autumn floods that followed

a summer of brushfires.

I walked the fields in a periwinkle crown,

thinking about my body changing

undeniably like the climate.

Lupus or rheumatoid arthritis?

The tests were inconclusive, but my biology

wouldn’t speak ceasefire.

I googled the profession with the lowest

suicide rate, thought forward

to sleeping again as my temperature kindled.

At the breakfast buffet Christie joked,

We need year-round strawberries

like we need another wildfire.

I overwatered hydrangeas and orchids,

my joints tender, hair like the plastinated

nervous system at Body Worlds.

There was snow on the news

in a faraway country that wasn’t snow

but rubble. I tucked into doughnuts

that make a tree of me, adding

each year another ring.

Great forests were being slashed

into fuelwood, the Congolese okapi dying.

These things happen.

Every friend on Instagram looked

ecstatic. Under cartoon clouds

of nitrogen we sprayed our bodies

with mosquito poison.

My thighs puckered and shook

as the earthquake-pleated city I come from.

Every contact leaves a trace.

Fingerprints are the small wounds

grooved when a baby touches the womb.

I deadheaded the garden,

each lovesick cricket stopped singing.

We talked about disease so much

the word undid itself.

On the last night, we bathed

under a light-grazed sky.