print previewback KATHRYN HAEMMERLE
Peripheries
This is the process I see now, internal rupture
as through a streaked microscope,
how light outside the body breaks off into nothing.
Last night I watched the sky
slip from its definition of blue, then pale
to the edges
of dried skin flaking from a hand, taut lines
like the veined strings
holding an orange’s flesh together. Something
inside me is unraveling,
blood the wrong ratio, diminished without me
knowing. So I wanted to believe
whatever makes up the horizon hasn’t changed
once since I last looked,
or since the first time I recognized a color
in it—child view from a small bed,
startled awake in the middle of night, winter
darkness purpled by light pollution
and sharp angles of branches. That sky can’t be
repeated. Time pulls the cells from us
and last night held none of its old colors.
Instead the tips of branches
were almost orange where they met the emptying
sky. I needed its glow to transfer
to the underside of my skin and hollows
of bone to understand
the disappearance of cells, this betrayal of parts,
to watch my body’s light fail. 
Mid-February at Navy Pier
Peripheries