For most of my life I remained unaware of this
the way a wingless arm is unaware of the conceit
of flight, but now I know that, yes, it is possible
to be allergic to a person, it is possible for
the body to be wholly autonomous in how
it chooses to preserve itself, no matter what
fleshy, amorphous image of the heart the synapse
might conjure; a great fire muted by holy water,
a blue room with one pink knob -- no matter what
you think you want, it’s the body that decides,
& will reject whatever antibodies revile its stasis
and in this case, the foreign cell was the Pisces fish --
a twin fish, a two-fish flush, invirtuous
& writhing in deceit and steeped
in the drama of belonging to too many lies
and yes, I had prayed that he’d finally come
back to me, and that when he’d knock, he’d appear
with one less life, but then he did appear -- a xenophile
on a tour of homes -- and that would be our last encounter
all I could do was heave at the sight of him
head oscillating dizzily between two different
men, two different lives, so piscean in his
world of elysian highs
but this time my systems nosed down
anatomy buckling out into autopilot
bringing me down to my knees to purge
and it was like this for days: I couldn’t stomach
a morsel, my receptors stunted
with the shock of an imminent shift
I wept and cocooned myself into
a sweat until, at once, it stopped --
and I woke to find myself at the kitchen table
perfectly unbothered
fingering cubes of fresh wet aloe into my mouth
as if life itself were some benign victory I’d won.