There is a roaring river beneath my skin, glacial ice flowing, collapsing everything in its path

Fish push through veins too small for them, swimming upstream

I feel my heartbeat everywhere

A trembling thud repeated and passed along, firing along corridors of joint and tissue

Durn dunh

Durn dunh

Durn dunh

In my fingers, one by one, a beat – keyboard style, like waves of smooth hypocritical staccato beats traveling from knuckle to knuckle. January March May July … the months with 31 days beat the most blood.

Ribs. Knees. Toes. Shoulders. Even a lower bicep?  All thumping in fractured rhythm not quite matching

My chest cavity: durrrn durrrn thump

The beat of chambers squeezing and sucking, siphoning and pumping, my whole body shuddering from a hidden melody harmonizing with the smaller notes in my jaw, my neck, my big toe …

A lullaby for sleep, an ache of repetition, heartbeat-torture.

I wish I had stubbed my toe – Oh! to throb from a temporary injury. But this is my chronic body reacting to its own trauma, forever trying to pump blood through a stubbed system, a broken body, trying to heal progressive damage that will never stop

This is the pattern and flow of my heartbeat.

It’s salmon season in my body, fish splitting the seams of tendons and spilling out, slippery and flopping over each other beneath my skin

The pain vibrates with the life of gilled-breathers waiting to be eaten by

A pain pill

To numb the salmon run coursing through the glacial river burning through my shaky body

I am a vessel of pain
A river of vibrating fish that hope to live
A body filled with desire to stop feeling the pain of migrating salmon and burning freezing water exploding past ligaments

To all the parts that make my body

Feel alive

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End.

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