GLOSSY WARS 

What if your body is unfurling into an ocean?

What if all that is bruising you isn’t bruising you, what if your flesh is sieving and softening, growing see-through just to herald
all the flames inscribed in your bones?

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What if your eyes are turning black not because they are leaving you
but because of all the impossible light bursting through them?

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What if these scars that have claimed you are burning longer and larger, purpling just so as to crystallize into rivers
of amethyst, searing, deathless?

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What if your clamped, aching throat is a cannon, charged tight with sequins and with disco balls ready to erupt upon any of your exhalations, poised to sing with the force of a lifetime?

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What if you aren’t rotting inside, not rotting but blooming, your whole body twist-tying and blooming into a white, atomic peony far and wide enough to encroach the sun,

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And what if this peony perspires centuries’ worth
of morning dew, wilting down to earth in exaltation, candying its expanses in snowy tongues that drool oceans, oceans proclaiming everything that's been lost of you--

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You and all of your illuminance.
What if your body is unfurling into an ocean?