Rabies, Rabies by Tracy Gonzalez
Rabies, Rabies
Let me tell you how the pills make my life look.
Take the way the world appears when filmed through the lens of a master photographer; sweeping and
majestic; beauty in all things. An aerial shot of hundreds of flamingoes in flight over endless ocean blue,
a vibrating traffic of leaf-cutting ants, an old woman’s face lit up by her eyes, her toothless smile framed
against the rough exterior of a mud made house, a rust red scarf punching up her amber skin tone. Can
you feel these images inside you like an orchestra? Now take all of that away. Replace the master with
a smudged-lens novice. The birds never fly, the ants are simple vermin, the old woman remains a
forgotten invisible. All beauty subtracted. Hear it all dead inside of you.
These pills.
I have to take these pills every day. They make the corners of my mouth turn down and blur my eyes
into little gray stars. It’s hard to look at people with a face holding these two things.
These pills.
For three moments a day they make me feel like I’m wearing a jacket when I’m not and also, there is a
taste in my mouth of male ejaculate. These last two symptoms usually happen simultaneously and it
brings me back to the days I used to prostitute myself in the park. My knees full of leaves, toes of my
boots digging into damp earth.
Individual threats of men, stepping forward, stopping, stepping forward: a queue. Hands in their coat
pockets, spreading them wide, black bats, letting me in. Flapping wool edges whipping against my ears
in the wind. I’d think, rabies, rabies, chant it in time with the metronome of my movements. The prayer
of it. Until I got the poison out. Spitting its disease into the leaves, bats letting open their wings, bats
letting me go. Letting me gone.
Helping forget the men, the park in fall, my dirty knees.
These pills.
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Tracy Gonzalez is trying new things.
Visit her at http://trust-fall.blogspot.com.