CORINNA RAE REILLY
A CASE AGAINST CLEANING THE HOUSE
At night in his blue room a man counts
little tongues of rain licking down
the window. Somewhere a child swallows
something poison-yellow and is taken
to the place where nature is
forbidden. In a room lined with wax
paper beds, the child is told to be
still. The next day I watch my love leave
for an afternoon. I turn on the TV. The lung
is the first place the world enters
you. I turn it off, full from a breakfast
of spit and seed. My love left
empty and sweaty and new. There are six
phases of digestion. I am still in phase
one. I know this because I am grinding
teeth on tongue. In the next room the dog
chews his own arm. There are ten thousand
species living on our bodies – more
not us than us they say. Without them
we would sicken. At night the waxy
lights, the red and constant beep
of heart keeps the child from hearing
her dreams. Tomorrow in his bright
gray box the man will count someone
else’s money. Tomorrow my love will leave
a cash tip for a red haired waitress. Consider
every inch of your face crawls
with spiders. They mate and lay
eggs in your pores. Don’t feel
disgusted. They eat infection away
Corinna is thankful to live surrounded by trees in New York’s Hudson Valley where shares her home with her husband, two dogs, and a talkative cat. After a long hiatus from sharing her work, she is once again nudging it out into the world. Corinna’s poems are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Saranac Review, The Fourth River’s Tributaries, Green Ink Poetry, and elsewhere.