The Flying Lungs |
Issue 18
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My lungs finally freed themselves while I slept a good smutty semi-world, lungs like monarchs splitting their cocoon, lungs thinking how much more violence they could carnate out in the garden, tearing new shoots then diving through the neighbor's curtains, slashing nightclothes, lunging into their dreams. And in all this, leaving me lungless. Empty of years of spit nimbleness, hiking up and down rock-patterned trails, while here inside the curtains of my body without a window, and the power light of the air purifier assignmentless, and outside, birds tucked sulfur dream bushes, but I couldn't detail for them the plot of the lungs until it was too late: no petition, no expectant plan, no mimicry. Though I've been told one disease can put on a two-act play, one sister pretending to be a swollen sister like Chekov where the whole family, agog, drinks more vodka, but no it wasn't that, just so much I'd rather not remember about tricking my brother at card games and fickle friendships that could have lived on but skate-racing the street or grabbing the last piece of watermelon that would rescue thirst from the goblet of greed, ah yes, that would finish it. I understand there's a price to pay, one moment chest pumping in and out, then in an instant, panting with hands on knees, heartbeat a monarch's wings notched, and no they don't tell you the connection, how the heart pumps to gift lungs air, don't tell you the world is semi-world, the world is semi-shut off, only the shriveled beginnings of drawn darkness, and all down the block here a silence, no, a dark death because they never say if you're not a bird, what it's like when your lungs leave.
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Laurel Benjamin is the author of Written into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Publications: Pirene's Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. She invented a secret language with her brother.
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