"Immortelle" by Lindsay Donovan
Photo Credit: Noğman Hatice, obtained and licensed through Pexels.
Immortelle
I think a rat expired in the medication room. Tucked in
the furthest catacomb of a sharply antiseptic clinic. Dead bodies don’t crumble fast enough
in the night time. Too cold then, in the darkness. This is the best that death will ever smell.
I grab the aspirin, snap the light switch, and shut the door behind me. Trapping him.
The stench of it clinging to the hairs in my nose. An intense tugging to be remembered.
He is still in the early stages, the stages that carry a few dashes of balmy perfume
and also, curdled milk. A solid veil of stink. Its own door. The lock clicks once and once only.
The rifle just emptied, pearls of smoke. It clangs like the last note of survival. Mine ongoing.
This ripe beginning of decay doesn’t bother me. It reminds me of uncooked chicken, oily,
the cheap kind. My mother would leave it on the counter for a whole day, forgotten about
it in a spell, scalding; spit soaring, palms open. The chicken would be tangy, sour.
Not yet that stiff-blue and green rot, but the edges pointing to some change
on the horizon. The tide coming out.
Sprawled out in the bowels of our torn up city. Behind four walls. He is trapped.
Behind endless insulated tunnels. So easy to ignore the hidden trenches. Plaster over it.
Paint a nice Rumi quote on the cabinets. Not too long ago, we shat
in buckets and poured our excrements down onto the streets. This street.
Old state house, cow paths. I wonder was it a glue trap?
Was he too fat, misjudged the crawlspace, then starved? Fastened like a frame to the wall.
Is he in pieces. Had he ever been held.
We light incense, hold no elegies. It is stronger than him. Patchouli.
Stones pulled fresh from a river, iron struck with flame. Spice and musk twine in smoke as a lost
shriek for the now soundless. This unlikely design takes weeks. We supplement
poppies as a new belief to prevent the roots from forming in men’s veins
we scourge death with more burning and hope the odor dissipates. Soon, the scent will depart
the room and we will forget, too. But what do we know of mercy. The inconvenience of it.
Lindsay Donovan is a New England poet, born and raised in Massachusetts. She graduated from Emerson College in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing with a minor in Political Communication. She has recently had her first poem published, “Infinite Canon of Remembering (The Lake House)” in The Knight’s Library Magazine First Publication Series Volume 1. Lindsay currently works at Boston Healthcare for The Homeless Program where she teaches an introductory poetry course to veterans. She is enamored with Emo music, Anne Sexton, and her two cats Helena and Tusk.