The remaining questions
=======================

* Yasmin Jajarmi

> you may ask about
> 
> deformed structure: a white root onion bulb behind eyes, or
> 
> boggy green-grape bulging under knuckles, or the green
> 
> sprouts shooting from the carina, or the bifurcation
> 
> of open-lung
> 
> shaped as a bird's breastbone: sensual, white, snowy, open paths:
> 
> the things that remind us of the first cut in surgery, or me of
> 
> his legs apart in the evening;
> 
> you may ask about the paper-mache of our environment
> 
> mapped on the undressed body: a raspberry rash
> 
> or the leaky shimmer of virus-vesicles
> 
> nailed newly, painfully, on her back as
> 
> new shingles for the roof of her chest; or the
> 
> *coracoid*: the raven's beak
> 
> and the writing desk of shoulder tissue where it perches, or
> 
> the way the *sella turcica* sits precariously
> 
> atop the equine mind; the *lunate:* that deep, slow, concave
> 
> dimple-bone poised in the hands of
> 
> our root-skinned darlings as they bath us and
> 
> promise us poetry;
> 
> you may ask about the diffuse, metabolic whirring,
> 
> the humming invisible that makes chefs weep as they chop:
> 
> the electric ions in motion in blood:
> 
> a tick in potassium, a splash of acid, a white cell—

> but

> some questions are the stationary swept aside
> 
> on office desks to make room
> 
> for hurried lovers: whether he loved him and whether
> 
> the rectal tumour makes it painful
> 
> to love him still;
> 
> or whether she, in older age, ever wants to take a man
> 
> with her teeth and whether she feels she can,
> 
> if she wanted to: but we must not ask
> 
> about the unsnarled body's desires
> 
> so acutely preserved, laid with shy hands on the breakfast table,
> 
> for daily swallowing, for tucking in;
> 
> or whether my stethoscope
> 
> feels like a man's metal-cold, unwanted hands
> 
> beneath her breast; or if the barring of
> 
> his fresh, lit, sparky cigarettes in hospitals
> 
> was, all along, behind
> 
> his refusal to stay.

## Footnotes

*   Competing interests None.

*   Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.