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st64 Jan 2014
He will not light long enough
for the interpreter to gather
the tatters of his speech.
But the longer we listen
the calmer he becomes.

He shows me the place where his daughter
has rubbed with a coin, violaceous streaks
raising a skeletal pattern on his chest.
He thinks he's been hit by the wind.
He's worried it will become pneumonia.

In Cambodia, he'd be given
a special tea, a prescriptive sacrifice,
the right chants to say. But I
know nothing of Chi, of Karma,
and ask him to lift the back of his shirt,
so I may listen to his breathing.

Holding the stethoscope's bell I'm stunned
by the whirl of icons and script
tattooed across his back, their teal green color
the outline of a map which looks
like Cambodia, perhaps his village, a lake,
then a scroll of letters in a watery signature.

I ask the interpreter what it means.
It's a spell, asking his ancestors
to protect him from evil spirits—
she is tracing the lines with her fingers—
and those who meet him for kindness.

The old man waves his arms and a staccato
of dipthongs and nasals fills the room.
He believes these words will lead his spirit
back to Cambodia after he dies.
I see, I say, and rest my hand on his shoulder.

He takes full deep breaths and I listen,
touching down with the stethoscope
from his back to his front. He watches me
with anticipation—as if awaiting a verdict.

His lungs are clear. You'll be fine,
I tell him. It's not your time to die.
His shoulders relax and he folds his hands
above his head as if in blessing.

Ar-kon, he says. All better now.




                                                        by Peter Pereira



.
Peter Pereira (b. 1959)


Peter Pereira is a physician, a poet, and the founder of Floating Bridge Press. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry and To Come to Light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature. He has received the “Discovery”/The Nation and Hayden Carruth prizes, and has been a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

His poems are marked by their wit, humane observations, and range of both form and subject. In his chapbook, The Lost Twin (2000), and two full-length collections, Saying the World (2003) and What’s Written on the Body (2007), he seamlessly traverses his favorite themes, which include his work as a primary care provider at an urban clinic in Seattle, domestic life, suffering and the human condition, and the slippage of language.
He is as comfortable with free-verse narratives as he is with anagrams, and Gregory Orr calls him “a master of many modes, all of them yielding either wisdom or delight.” Edward Byrne has praised his formal innovations, “inventive use of language,” and “unexpected” juxtapositions. Pereira’s investigations have a prevailing undercurrent of celebration in the tradition of Walt Whitman, and even his deepest explorations of suffering are likely to be suffused with humour or hope.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/peter-pereira
Leseywut Dec 2013
You're caught up in my oxygen
I need you here so I can breathe
Like the ink spilled out of my pen
That needs to write to be read

You're mixed up in my chemicals,
Addictive, needed by my nasals
Like the medicines I don't need
Still I take though I know I may bleed

You're the scent I want to inhale
You slowly get into my veins
Like a spell told in my tale
A king that in my heart always reigns

You're the sun forever shining
Needed by my skin ev'ryday
Like a bear I need whispering
"Be careful, you might get burned if you stay."

I might be your worst nightmare, dear
But to me you are my sweetest dream
With you I have nothing to fear
Though in the blood we might get to swim

A thousand miles won't be a problem
Just remember my name, It's enough
You're like a rose without any stem,
Still ****** when I hold in my arms

You're my oxygen needed by my lungs
If you'll be gone, then I'll be too
Like a song needed to be sang
Let me be your melody in everything you do.
Daniel Dec 2019
Sometimes people tell me my hair looks like a big nug of bud and they wanna smoke that **** but it doesn’t smell like rainforest when it burns and they also burn it when it is on my head so my young Rodger Moore looks turn expressly to exaggerated horror at the physical and emotional pain. When faced with such pain I often laps into an imaginary state where my unreality is built up by a self-supporting paranoid delusion from which there is little escape and often real life awakenings land me in the most extraordinary situations. The most recent of which was when I found myself tied to the under carriage of the Ghan train suspended by gaff tape and with a mankeeny blindfolding me. At the next train stop I ran from the troop of floberjack monsters and made a potion out of emu foot prints to give me magical protection from those monsters. Then I went to sleep in a painted cave and woke up from the gentle tickle of ants between my toes . I can never hear what ants are talking about because I am a bit deaf but I always like to know what they are saying about me behind my back so I poured honey in my ear and they went inside my brain. I realised that ant communicate by chemical smell and not sound so I let them crawl through the canals that go to my nasals and was able to smell their talking. After some weeks of difficulty in translations we were about to create a hybrid form of communication they assured me that they had only good intentions and desired only to consume my flesh from the inside out when survival strictly required and would stop when there was opportunity to collect the teeth from non-indigenous creatures. I found that they breaded a particular hate from the introduction of the cane toad and they intend to irradiate all the population of a very common variety of red rose bush in a 300 square meter area of Melbourne I told them I would take them if they didn’t mind going to the grand prix and this amplified their intents.  I don’t like the grand prix I was just lying and so when I left the cave I did a big sneeze on purpose and flew home on my special magic grass matt that is woven from red rose roots. After that I slept in the shed for around 45 mins and bathed my hands in petrol and told my wife I was just working on the motor bike so as to quell any suspicion she may have of me existing within a self-supporting paranoid delusional state.
Ryan O'Leary Feb 2021
Pinocchio did it, just look at
the fame he had, it's a carte
blanche for telling Porky’s.

One could become a politician,
and during Covid19 with masks
nobody would take any notice.

So, if we shorten our penises
the nasals will elongate, this is
logic based on circumstantial.


Ps.

This is a misogynistic poem
gender selective and anti
feminist in content, it would
be a lie to state otherwise.

— The End —