Broken Poem by Stephanie Street

Last night,
my little body was a spent battlefield.
Adversaries fought, Operations executed,
(veins ripped through,
calculus like a sputnik dragged to liberty
in a samplepot)
and in the aftermath, the ruins smoldered.

Face to the onslaught,
like Lawrence in the desert, beetle-eyed,
I endured the night.
Minutes dropping like treacle from a spoon,
and with every one
the crust, like a cake, on my lips
inched thicker,
the fever bedded in.
Hair in sweatsnakes,
dribbling down to my puckered breasts,
one moment little ice-stones, the next
great bags of simmering flesh.

Like Carthage I burned,
razed to a quiver
on the watery bedclothes in the morning.