
Psychogenic Illness I & II
by Jessica Stark
PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS (CASE STUDY)
I.
PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS (CASE STUDY)
II.
And another thing: the 60s
were a great year for mass hysteria.
Tanganyika schoolgirl (’62)
and a joke gains wind, loses origins.
Traveled downhall, he said,
pursed the chalkboard.
By the thousand, I
hear, drank a
still out of palms that shook.
18 months in ecstasy.
Couple this tender close to
thrush, breath, rash, tears—
What’s the saying?
You can’t compare apples to—
I guess you had to be there.
A less flashy entrance, but same
what-have-you and 62 falling sick.
Source by speck, all open-wide—
no detection for this flea.
Bit women hard on arms out-
stretched over textile, bit so deep
they went outmind, all sticky-good.
And damn didn’t they deserve it
—Ladies making dresses, what next?
For your touch: taut eyes, and too
much love for our sisters—our cistern.
It is more difficult to stop laughing
during a moment that’s candid—
an intervention, a funeral, a sacrifice.
Is this thing on?
Reported dizzy, flu-like, numb, they said,
spent days in catacomb embrace.
Love to each Freesia Warmblood & regard
that we do sting bc this one came
last (’67) and they call it an epidemic.
One man, so fearing, turned hooks,
went fishing line, went shoe-string
all around his genuine member gone
wrong, he said, gone missing, gone
N ow that’s a punchline.
I am not trying to whittle
photographs out of ghosts
Or take the wind out of
A perfectly wound spool.
We are small as tree frogs,
can oppose two fingers
in a vise-like grip
We taste eggs from leaves
and lie open-eyed, restless,
beneath hearsay and
circumstance,
around heresy and
stifled question:
Does laughter die?
Do gods grow old?
Outside, little girls shoot fat pigeons
like small skyscrapers from above.
Jessica Stark is a PhD Candidate in English at Duke University, studying the intersections between poetry and comic books. Her poetry manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2016 Double Take Grand Prize and was published in Heavy Feather Review, Volume 5. Her poetry has appeared in Potluck, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. You can find her most frequently near a lake or a library.
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