Zach Linge

Rushes of Rouge

Fluorescence through eyelids is prenatal
pink, and it means the pills didn’t work.
Someone is pinching your thighs, hard.
Somebody’s shouting “What did you take?”
And you cry out, you think, but the sound
is distant, and who would leave such heavy,
welcoming blankness—this kind sleep, soft
as the fur between a rabbit’s leg and chest.

The world is over now. You sense this.
The immediate past is a mirror away, and
people who love you hover like a shallow
breath at the edge of a still and dark lake.
Fruit juice through a straw; familiar fingers
dabbing petroleum across your crusted lips.
Repeated pink in your eyelids cries daylight,
so you’re exacting people who love you again

with simple questions answered by sideways
glances through patient smiles. “Yes, we
are in Austin,” and “You’ve asked us this.”
The machinic umbilical cord drips gently.
Rushes of rouge will return to your face.
People have reasons for killing off queers.
A shrink with a clipboard enters to ask why
you tried. What is it about this body you hate.