Your Shrinking Host

Ripping cold sausage with greasy hands and aching teeth.

I feel no hunger, just an urgent sense of duty

to nourish this shaking body because you live here.

Every bite is an offering, a salty sacrament 

for you, who lives in the crevices of my cortex—

stroking synapses and pressing thick lips 

to friends’ fading faces, stifled melodies

and a thousand other scraps you were never entitled to touch.

Sometimes the only sound is you breathing with my lungs,

tapping with my dirty fingers, and lying with my tongue.

You will eat me in the process—

a fetal twin in bloody, amniotic juice—

cords tangling, stitching us together

until I’m sucked into your nourished self.  

Will you promise to feed me in turn?

(2014)