lEPROSARIUM*

A gray simmering day, cloud bursts and a colic of rain and marrow, such is the day, the man in the hat supposed, a boil in a same such pot. No, the sky is a leprosarium and each cloud a severed limb, a necrotic fall-away; each nose, finger, joint, a reminder of nature’s un-heavenly authority, rot and blister, a graveyard of molt and scurvy. The beggar woman harried behind the Post Office, lifted her skirts and peed; a cockscomb of urine jangling against the brickwork, her eyes pressed tight, a rifling continence. When she was a girl, a farthing child, her mother slapped her cheek for urinating in the park, her skirt pillared with urine, the sky a robin’s egg blue, so she remembered. Her father, whom she seldom saw, was busy living out his misery in a rooming house drunken on pot wine and Listerine. She imagined her life as a circus, clowns and freaks, a boy who looked like a dog, a woman with a beard, a strongman with bumpy arms, children sucking on cotton-candy and caramel-apples, and her father swigging pot sherry from a plastic cup, his eyes crossed in on themselves, a nose like a pared carrot, a fancy woman at his side.