BARBARA A MEIER
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
Photo by Joel Filipe
Raynaud’s
Hate replaces the blood
running from the heart to head.
It lingers in my toes,
compromised by my Raynaud’s.
It settles in my fingertips;
and the hand warmers can’t do their job.
Hate hovers on my tongue, a communion wafer
gone sour. A litany, a chant, a mantra,
I repeat over and over again:
“I hate you.”
Hate surges vermillion, coalesces to blue,
of words frozen like hard green peas
in plastic freezer bags on swollen joints.
The hate sears my veins: a myocardial infarction.
I can’t move past the feeling, and it strips
the oxygen from my brain: Cerebral anoxia killing cells.
Hate murders the muscle memory,
pumps cyanide to the very end of capillaries,
robbing life from heart cells.
The dead is alive in me.
Barbara A Meier teaches kindergarten in Gold Beach, OR, where she continually frets over how to get five-year-olds to start a sentence with an uppercase letter, end with a period, and make sense. In her spare time, she looks for agates, petrified wood and fossils on the beautiful Southern Oregon beaches. She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, Cacti Fur, Highland Park Poetry, and Poetry Pacific. basicallybarbmeier.wordpress.com
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