First Aid

Madison Bigelow

You made chicken or fish. I can’t recall,

but I see your hands cradling a casserole dish

covered in cornflowers;

Hot days tripped into carbonated nights.

We took spoonfuls of citronella

yellow like medicine to cure the bubbling sun trapped

under skins &severed cork bobbed in the bottle but I didn’t mind—

something to chew on

&I am thinking of gentler times: considering

the evening last summer in your backyard. Rolling it against my teeth,

elbows perched on the table &I remember

how mine slipped across its rutted top.

I predicted tetanus; instead

my arm was covered in a creeping blued patina that framed wound’s edges

heartbeat visible through the skinned flesh.

You tended to me with two fingers hooked

&scooping aged muck from the canyoned cut. We laughed.

It was so odd, the evening tomatoing us a seedy, pulping hemorrhage.

The mosquitos took a sample as we eclipsed our own ripening.

We will both bleed for finer reasons by the end of this year.