Wounds Poem by Theresa Haffner

I am turning the dial on the radio—switching stations looking for some music to listen to. It is late at night and the lamplight in my hotel room casts steep shadows.

I listen to each station for a few seconds before deciding to change it. I have been reading Rimbaud and the mood hangs heavy in the room, the images still lingering in my mind.

I am naked and my legs in the thick lamp light are like a latticework of tiny red dots, needle marks, puncture wounds, and tiny hair follicles where I have shaved my legs, imposed over the drifting clouds of bruises where injections have missed the veins, and old scars of abscesses that have healed, the ravages of my soul. And still below that the Cimmerian and disappearing network of blue veins deep within the skin, receding, hidden, obscure, like deep rivers. The suggestions of blue the only clue to their location, very hard to hit.

It is a pity that I don’t have any veins closer to the surface, easier to see. But I have used them so many times, injecting them with my mania, that they are no longer in evidence.

So I have to use the deep ones, and they are very difficult to hit, so that I miss more times than I hit, and bruises emerge and migrate like ornate tattoos.

I don’t lament what I have done to my body. It is mine and I can do with it as I please. Only that it is so much harder to inject than it used to be, as I have come to love it more. It has become like a religion to me.

I have been taking amphetamine, and I want to inject some more. Which is why I have taken a break from Rimbaud.

The room is deep and the city whispers outside my second story window.

I begin exploring the flesh of my thighs and my hips, searching for a place to inject. There are no obvious places. Many places have been used two or more times and are unusable.

Flesh tones in the lamplight. As I examine the latticework of puncture wounds, bruises, and scars superimposed over my skin, my eyes begin to swim, and I begin to hallucinate.

Lines intersect and rearrange themselves across my naked flesh into words that I can read. They are rapidly changing, only in existence a moment before changing into something else, so that it is difficult to tell what they mean.

So I began to read my legs:

Velvet skies / none of the above / felt pink / pride of love / felt the

night / pistils of thirst / it shed light in time / futile / ray of thought /

entry / King of Poetry / make dim mask / denials / ergot of love / the

one I dare / thine own heart / thrash the halls / chemise / the hand of

daffodils / herds Rev. the rose / chant of goat / medicine of rye / faults

I have some / lady of love / religion of light / my boat / my daily need /

then one day he died / faith / bottom of the vault / effects as yet

unknown but unintentional / phantom of self / but then I can / take ships

to the other shore / other flames other loves / the flesh tones impale /

listen to the chrysanthemums / the vile pigeons / Ode to Endymias /

Absu Syrta Sq. / ancillary / new dictionaries / I said synaptic / old

fisherman under the bridge / henbane root / Atropine / anabolic /

triplicate /

At last I give up on finding a place to inject and decide to take a break, the blood running down my leg. I will try again later.

Once again I begin turning the dial on the radio. The music. The static between stations. The place between stations where two stations come in at once. Once more I pick up Rimbaud. I will be awake long past the dawn.