I'll practice plague with the moon
I'll lie down and I'll lie up
I’ll let time pass like a corpse on the sea
If you saw the way I look at birds

You’d understand this famine
I love the death mask—how romantic
A new face for the occasion
The horsemen and the butlers

The doors almost too heavy
If you practise plague then you know
What it means to inhabit a body
Enter and exit at will

Get off at the next stop
Talk in tongues and blues
Cut it out of your mouth
like homemade piercings

Death is so feminine—no?
See how Mary held Jesus
or the skeleton with her veil?
Plague is built into bodies

Clawing and remaking over and over
Lesions of Womanhood
your first home half-lived in
I practise plague

Some days there’s no need to try
I lie still in my bed
unwilling to decompose
like the saints

Blue moon eyelids
Purple mascara
Black nails
We rehearse