Slosh

You are available
and it enters through any of the availability

or augurs straight through the skin
whipping a mad tail which it then discards.

It tours through the membranes, through the gradients of heat
through the chemical slosh. The pure veins feed it.

In the bloodstream, or in the digestive system
the male worm with his eight testicles
hooks permanently to its mate.

There is no need for imagination.
You are all threshold.

They are never you, but you are them.

Obligate

When you are empty enough to be entered
I will oblige.

When you have room for sleep, sleep will come.


What can I offer you?
Not the distant, unmet things
but the things already here but unknowable.

Adrift in your tissues.

Taenia

If you have it
it is only after it spent some time in a pig

where it absorbed carbohydrates and amino acids
as a larval form in the pig’s brain

and now descends
to the intestine of its human host

where it exudes an acid
that makes your fluids easier to absorb

since it has no digestive tract but feeds
with its entire body

and even though you have nourished it
for years, you remain asymptomatic

except for the hunger
which may be the way your other self

the one now an essential service
is remembered, or maybe not.

If you have it, none
of the mouths are yours

Monty Reid is a Canadian writer currently living in Ottawa. Among his many collections are Crawlspace (Anansi), Garden (Chaudiere) and The Luskville Reductions (Brick) as well as the chapbooks Seam (above/ground) and The Nipple Variations (postghost). A longtime museum professional, he had long stints at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (Alberta) and as Director of Exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. He helped to found the Writers Guild of Alberta, started the now-extinct Dinosaur Review, and was for many years the Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine. He has just retired from his position as Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.

Published July 15 2023