Inoculation

By Marc Cid

I bought my first cardiac scars with the foolish belief
that poison could be neutralized
by venom, so I learned the hard way–
feverish convulsions, veins on fire
blinded eyes and swelling everything

That I couldn’t be your antitoxin
that you couldn’t be my cure
that sucking out each other’s poison from
self/consensual-inflicted wounds
just means we both now shared
an additional blood-clotting factor
belaboring our handicapped hearts until they gave up

I was hoping that we could multiply like negative integers
erase the minus signs from our lives in our togetherness
but all we did was add
and the numbers
falling from our eyes
don’t lie