Poetry by Mathew Fu
Art by Keira Innes
Like a pair of inverted lungs, your bronchioles are searching for air.
The sky is vacant save for the budding moss on your branches:
all those arborescent alveoli—unearthed and breathing.
It is just the silhouette of your vasculature perforated on a dying day:
the chest X-ray came back metastatic.
Yet you are all but static—the buds bursting and bifurcating
down your trachea. All those dendritic dryads:
already innervated and urged inert. There are so many this wanting.
I am watching the daylight fade as your cancer exhales and collapses outwards:
an auburn affliction as a singular sigh; an aubade on auscultation.
There are so many this fleeting. But you are still the utterance
of all who have immortalized: the hunger in a breath gone agonal.
As if to beg: I want it.
Please, I want it all.