“Swallowing” by Sarah Hilton
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Swallowing” by Sarah Hilton, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.
Swallowing
By Sarah Hilton
Become sick long enough and your illness becomes
an animal. My body began growing
something poisonous inside
my mouth after I met you. My tonsils
ballooning after our first kiss.
My throat puckered, an over ripe fruit.
You slip into my mouth anyways
and graze against the wound
with urgency, finding every corner of its cavity
like water swamping the bath. I swallow
to prevent drowning, the salt of you
in my throat, the calcium of my illness
against soft palate. You love my neck
the best, the reach of your hand
cutting through sleep. In the morning, you
undress my body and ask how much
can I relax my throat. I cannot
understand the way the mind
succumbs to the body
like this, how the body can discover itself
choking and the mind will lay back
in surrender, abandon breathing in
the name of love, sink into suffocation,
call it want. I was belly up that whole winter,
collapsed in your sheets and falling back on
my illness. Those days overtaken by my disease,
I continue to call you by another name,
guide your hands to my neck, mythologize
our love again and again. The next month,
my tonsils become two tumors blocking the way
to my body. I breathe only
through my nose. I choke on water. Blood
pooling behind my tongue. My mind does not go
to medicines, the hospital. I Google
ways I can incite pleasure without a mouth.
When you leave, I drink in
as much air as I can. I am still
gasping for it. These days,
I still reach for my throat
when I hear your name, feel your echo
awaken a throb in my gullet.
I try instead to find
the place my mind and body
intersect. Put a name to the animal.
Put a name to the ghost.
Copyright © Sarah Hilton
Sarah Hilton (she/they) is a lesbian librarian, or…a lesbrarian! Her work has been featured in several print and online journals including Minola, Untethered, and CV2. She is the author of Saltwater Lacuna (Anstruther Press) and the digital chapbook homecoming (MODEL Press). They live in Toronto.
Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members.
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