Overflow

The rheumatologist sizes me up, presses her soft hands into my wound nest of a body, nothing unfurling under her hands like it’s supposed to. My cane looming lilac, my fifth appendage I sprouted from a dream and allowed to fang into an organ, tumorous and in bloom against concrete, shuffling stairwells, flights and stationary things, a stability I forgot.

They draw a dozen vials of my warm indigo blood, streaking crimson against curved glass jutting from the nurse’s blue-gloved fists, my platelets weapons. Everybody needs me but no one will keep me. All the tests come back inconclusive : this doesn’t make me a mystery, just a stubborn femme, uncooperative flesh spilling into public space, an occupation

Piss ripples down my palms, I pinch the specimen container, hoist my tote, palm my cane, slip down eggshell-lacquered hall, turn over my bodyliquid, they will run a test and tell me why my hands seize and curl, why pain trickles down from my skull like a rain shower. Stress hormones likely plentiful, obese and

By Jesse Rice-Evans

Biography:

Jesse Rice-Evans is a queer Southern poet. Read her work in Entropy, Heavy Feather Review, Public Pool, and the chapbooks Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press) and The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press). Follow her at @riceevans for tweets about bad TV and herbal medicine.