It is stifling         here in this room.
It is in the front of the house
and all day the sun     bakes
it       through the wall.
The window is small,
large enough only to let in heat.
All night            the walls                close in,
press upon me.            But Uncle is kind
enough to allow me here,   so I can’t complain.
Even sleep has become       a burden.
It is my sickness.           I know this.

My body rebels against itself.
I lay all night in my sweat,
                                               and when I wake,
the yellow ring where my body was.
Sometimes, too,
                             there is blood.
It seeps into my hair, and delicately paints
the head of my shadow self.
I cannot tell, in the dark,
                                       what is sweat or blood.
I am too weary to turn on the light,
to wipe anything away. Some mornings
                                                                              I wake to find my bladder
                                      or bowels have betrayed me during the night;
my image painted in everything my body expels.
Each dawn I must walk painfully to the river
to wash the sheets.               I do not want Uncle to see my shame.
I wash them again behind the house so that he may see them clean.
                                                           See that I obey his only command.

This morning
                    I am too weary
          to walk
                              and the stones 
                                           of the dawn
                                           are too hard.
                               The river,
                                            too cold.
I shall fold up this sheet,
                     hide it
          beneath
the mattress.
It hurts
           to eat,
burns
           to drink.
My body now
           has nothing
                                            left
                                                      to stain.
All that was left in me
                            is now
           beneath
the bed.

When Uncle goes out to market today,
I shall take a fresh white sheet from the trunk.
I shall drape my bed in it.     I shall lie down and wait.

–E. K. Mortenson,
The Fifteenth Station (2012)
Accents Publishing

E. K. Mortenson is the author of a chapbook, Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010), and a full-length collection, What Wakes Us (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming). His work also appears in both print and online journals and anthologies. He was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is poetry editor at Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor. He writes and teaches in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and two children.