Destiny O. Birdsong
Because there are no disposal laws for syringes
in this state, I keep a bleach jug packed with syringes.

Once, in a dry-lipped fugue, I dropped two pens
in a new one; now the laundry is blood-fracked with syringes.

Even so, I believe it’s clean coming out of the dryer.
The white-coated vampire states it as fact: syringes

rinse the surgeries away. She’s got a house to feed,
where tiny mouths drool fluid like primed syringes.

I’m not dying yet, but she wants to be sure.
She asks me to deliver a ransom of syringes.

Labs, she calls them: needle-nosed hounds dispatched
by her keyboard; she doesn’t actually handle syringes.

Instead, she sends me to a different wing. The phlebotomists
thump the anticoagulant in my syringes:

stop telling people that ain’t your hair when you bought it.
They pull blood but inject beauty—compassionate syringes.

On the drive home, the guardrails look like casket lowerers;
lane markings, a mortician’s stitch; the cars blunt syringes

hunting out home, the vena cava, in which I brine
a life, my flesh as seasoned by syringes

as my mother’s holiday turkeys. I’m suspended between
every ancestor who lived or treasoned with syringes.

Their ghosts OD in my dreams; riddled with holes,
they beg me to remember their names. I ask which syringes

could bring them back to life. I awaken
to track marks under my nose. A new plot of syringes

dampens on the front steps. I am destined to infuse
survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes
from the book NEGOTIATIONS / Tin House
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As a person diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, I wanted to write a poem that linguistically reflected my exhaustion with syringes. So I began a draft after Kaveh Akbar’s “Orchids Are Sprouting From the Floorboards,” but halfway through, I thought, the ghazal is also great for repeating single words. My favorite fun fact about this poem is that not one but two of my names appear in the final couplet.
 
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