I will be the death of you, she tells me, the first words
since we kissed and her canines broke skin, the line
of my gums yielding with the whole of me. Her eyes
are hungry-shining and there is nothing I can do
but follow her, sinuous and sinking. My lover,
the mycologist, was not my lover yesterday, was not before
this moment, hands buried in my ribcage, tongue a vice,
thigh just where I could turn my head and bite and tear.
She unspools my capillaries like a seamstress, bloody-
weaver-woman. Takes her favorite mold, inoculates
my skin, watches it fester, spread, envelop. Claims me
her new home. I shudder, butterfly-pinned,
my body ready-rotting, my lover, the mycologist,
bent over me and gnawing at my clavicle, urging
mycelia into my ligaments. In the morning, I hold her
to my ruptured body, let her eat what she will.
The mushrooms marry us, the fungal priest (p)residing
in our tendons and our iron-slurry organs. Her kiss
is aching, pulling blood from me—she says, my wife,
my fascination. I am florid, fungi fruiting
from my hyphae-heavy flesh, silk caps parting my skin,
and my lover, the mycologist, rakes her teeth down,
devouring. I writhe, upturning like a new grave’s
earth, kiss my way to the sweetest source of rot.
My lover, the mycologist, teeth at my neck, implores
me not to leave her. Promises to thread me through
with mushroom-stuff, to kill me gentle-sweet, to hold me—
tells me, no one else would give me this.
We will be terribly in love, she tells me, teeth at my neck.
Above our heads are the jars—she feeds her pretty children
bones and flesh, and in the morning our hands will be dirty
to the elbows with intestines, burying the bloated body
of her cat, too big for jarring. My lover, the mycologist,
kisses me in the garden, gore on our fingers, tangling,
strangling-vinely. She pulls me away from the upturned
earth, promises to bury me there when she kills me.
We are terribly in love, and it consumes me. I choke
on the hyphae. Her attention a parasite, soothing me
to flushed compliance. She says to me, my wife,
my second body. The selfhood of me languors,
flayed, seduced, sucked at like a honeycomb. My lover,
the mycologist, murmurs that I will be eaten well.
With the moon hidden, I see the fruiting bodies line
her back, spine-anchored, growing right from bone.
One night we eat poison. It feels like sex, the way it pins
my nerves down. She watches it happen, traces my blood
vessels, popping, expanding, gushing, coating the bed,
and she kisses the last breath from my lungs. She does
not die, the caps go down easy on her, slinking through
her larynx, burrowing like bloodworms into bone.
The mycologist is more mycelium than meat. I bite down
on her shoulder in my post-mortem, coital shudders.
The upturned earth is warm and writhing, and it is not rot
that crawls into my mouth, my eyes, my ears. I sigh, and sink,
heart soggy, spongy, wet. My lover, the mycologist,
she tells me, come home when you are ready.
Looks like nematodes, she tells me. Beneath her gaze
my arm festers, bone-flayed, blood-worms writhing
like capillaries come alive. They have been here
since I came back from the dead. My lover,
the mycologist, breathes spores into my skin,
jealous that my passengers are not her
favored guests. The nematodes persist, but mushrooms grow, too,
mycelia lancing through osteocytes, pervading marrow.
My arm across my eyes. The nematodes descend,
finding soft purchase on my white sclera, staining red
with ulnal blood. They bring the mushrooms with them.
In the morning, the mycologist is at my wrist, vampiric,
biting, tearing. Nematode and hyphae in her teeth.
Gore-grinning at my wormy, threaded eyes, her mouth
approaching, gentle pressure as she tears them
from the optic nerves. It is not a painful sensation.
She knows, as we pass Aminata back and forth
between our tongues, I won’t again be poisoned,
so she pushes at the limit of my undead immortality,
gnaws at my still-warm bones, feeds me
to her fungal colonies. She says to me, my wife,
the incubator. The mycologist mollified, my nematodes
get closer to my heart, racing her hyphae, chasing
iron-heavy hemocytes back to their source.
My lover, the mycologist, admits defeat, but I will not
let her withdraw from my smooth ribs, I keep
murmuring, stay, as second death approaches.
She tells me, it will be so odd, to see your body still.