I’m reading Maggie Nelson

occasionally stopping to cough up phlegm

in some indeterminate post-fever stage of the flu
she’s living on a canal with a junkie boyfriend

or that’s how I read it
the poems might as well be called ‘no good will come of it’

raging despair oozes out of them

toxic as the canal’s stinking sludge

or my almost fluorescent yellow-green phlegm
I hack

‘Spit,’ says my mind

I spit out on the tissue

‘Good girl,’ I say out loud
I learned this
my mother, not big on emotion or touch,

excelled at sickbed ritual

earlier tonight I was telling my girlfriend

(scavenger of sleep, getting what she can between my bouts)

how it calmed me as a child, calms me now
the bucket by the bed in case you were sick

the towel laid across the bed underneath you

in case you didn’t quite get to the bucket

its strange comforting roughness

the smell of disinfectant

when the bucket came back fresh
then I instructed her in percussive therapy

another thing I learned from my mother

it breaks up the phlegm
she pounded me on the back as I lay angled off the sofa

head resting on my forearms on the ground

up/down from the waist to the top of the shoulder blades
then helped me back onto the sofa

where I lay sweating

while she looked on with patient palpable concern
I notice we get on better when I’m sick

she less defensive and kinder

I more vulnerable, less autocratic
at night a Buteyko technique I found on the internet

eases the coughing

to begin, you take a breath

and hold it ‘till discomfort’

the aim is to create air hunger
lately I’m learning to tolerate

the right kinds of discomfort

to honour the hungers my mother discounted 
Maggie tells her boyfriend

it’s not the content / I’m in love with, it’s the form
how can you separate

a slender torso, small breasts, their exuberant nipples

a clitoris that is a chameleon to the tongue

now rampant, now indiscernible

somehow melded back into bone

from the love, the rightness

the great goodwill
her habits with time which are mine with money

no planning

then blaming the shortfall

on some unexpected but perfectly foreseeable circumstance
her face turned to me on the sofa

its energy and joy

dark circles under her eyes

because I’ve been keeping her up at night

coughing