Fever Within

Rusted Sheet Metal with Nails, Ronald Lockett (1965-1998), New Orleans Museum of Art

by Andy Young

 

Curled in the center 

                       she is fixed

           to her  

                       atmosphere

                                  torn strips of silver 

peek out to some clear 

                       place beyond 

           where once the silver 

                      was a tin barn

                                 holding the hot 

hay mouths of young horses

                      curved warmth 

          of new eggs

                      here in the museum 

                                 its edges threaten 

to flake to dust

                      her spine 

          a series of holes

                      her outline pocked 

                                 with emptiness

— needles pulled out

                       what is not her 

            pulls away

                      the world curling off

                                 with its bright rust

leaving her peeled back 

                      to the substratum

           of fever the clinic 

                      oxidizing around her 

                                 only her body 

pinned down and the tube 

                       through which a liquid does not 

           drip but erodes 

                       between the silver intervals 

                                  of what nails her there

---

Andy Young is the author of four chapbooks, including John Swenson Dynamicron, just out from Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length poetry collection, All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014). She teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Southern Review, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Her translations, with Khaled Hegazzi, are featured in the Norton Anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond.