Death by Poetry

When they opened her up

she was riddled with poems.

They didn’t even try to transcribe.

They just sewed her up again and sent her home.

Three months later in the spring of the year

she died of poems,

her body alive with them–

protest poems in her spleen

love sonnets in both auricles of her enlarged heart

arteries clogged with blockage

her lungs so cloudy with poems

each breath must have been a labor

her breasts, hard as on the third day

when the milk comes in,

engorged with poems she could not let down

safe poems in situ–haiku tightly formed and cyclic

ruptured poems spilling infectious mixed metaphor

|into her abdominal cavity

an ectopic poem that could not gestate,

ready to burst the tube

that stretched in holding in its will to life,

parasitic poems

plagiarized and feeding on the good bacteria

one last magnificent poem, almost spoken,

lodged in her throat like a piece of steak.

Say only

that she died of beauty undigested

like rough rubies

and we need only read her death

to be gifted of it all.

Maureen Flannery