For something which may one in the '90s, or in the next
1,000--
in the year 20,000 something, our way of publication
is very slow.
We wait for a book for four years
or three years or something.
It may be shortened by now.
So I intend to--
a series of poems which describe some syndromes,
because of the official-- the script
denotation of some medical syndromes
are very metaphorical.
They're very imaginative.
We have a green stick syndrome, which is--
it is funny-- which is a fracture of a child's bones.
Green stink syndrome.
We have a vanishing lung syndrome, which is lovely.
The syndrome is not lovely, but the description is lovely.
Really it's just [INAUDIBLE] emphysema
and the lung just disappears.
And this is another legitimate syndrome--
"Crush Syndrome."
"Once when in winter dark I was cleaning the concrete mixer,
its cog wheels like the teeth of the bald rat of Ibadan,
snapped up the glove with the hand inside.
The finger bones said a few things
you don't hear very often, and then it grew quiet,
because even the rat panicked.
In that moment, I realized I had a soul.
It was soft, black with red stripes,
and it wanted to be wrapped in gauze.
I put it beside me on the seat and steered
with the healthy hand.
At the clinic, during the injections
of local anesthetic and the stitching,
the soul held ferally with its mandibles
to the knob of the table.
It was now a whitish crystal, and had a grasshopper's head.
The fingers healed.
The soul turned at first to granulation tissue,
and later a scar, hardly visible."