Category: Nathaniel Duggan

When I think of you, I’m actually
thinking of a distillation of organs.
Livers, kidneys, vessels
through which blood flows
like the dappled leaf shadows
whose shifting I never saw
because I spent my summers alone
in basements wondering if bugs
have hearts or even lungs.
No one knows. God is dead.
Society crumbled so we built
a giant robot and launched that baby
to space to do battle with a species
of cricket-sized aliens, because
we need triumphs now more than ever,
no matter how small and scurrying they be.
It’s like this morning when I took
a beer instead of Tylenol, vanquished
a whole day before it even started.
To the liver it’s all the same,
mere surges in the gut, and in fact
I often mistake bowel quivers for love
and you my lover for your evil clone.
Because what is a robot anyway
but an overgrown insect? What is
a heart except a collapsing colony.
What are you if not the shore
upon which I may finally crash,
take stock of myself, and formulate
a world worth worshipping.

This was the year I lost my face. It was one of those gradual things. My features fell away from me in little flecks of flesh like lint, and each morning I woke to this strange light dusting on my pillow. Initially I invested in potions, plant aloes, all-natural oozes I could smear in radioactive hues across my cheeks, forehead, nose. When that didn’t work, I began to think, maybe, the problem was the drinking.