I.
Hate replaces the blood
running from the heart to head.
It lingers in my toes,
compromised by my Raynaud's.
It settles in my fingertips;
and the hand warmers can't do their job.
Hate hovers on my tongue,
a communion wafer gone sour.
A litany, a chant, a mantra,
I repeat over and over again:
"I hate you."
II.
Hate surges vermillion,
coalesces to blue,
of words frozen
like hard green peas
in plastic freezer bags
on swollen joints.
The hate sears my veins:
a myocardial infarction.
I can't move past the feeling,
and it strips the oxygen from my brain:
Cerebral anoxia killing cells.
Hate murders the muscle memory,
pumps cyanide to the very end of capillaries,
robbing life from heart cells.
The dead is alive in me.
III.
Hate is a zombie life.
The dead walking,
dragging gruesome limbs,
tattered shredded skin, and lipless smiles
to concertina wire fences.
There I hang, bloodless, on razor edges.
A meat hook embedded in my sternum.
Intestines drooping in gangrene slime,
coating the wire of my cross.
I am hate crucified.
and there is no Resurrection
when hate replaces blood sacrifice.
IV.
Hate needs a retell.
A breath to kindle blue veins to scarlet,
on a body hung from a wooden cross.
Hate is a bruise fading
to newborn skin, bathed
in the water imbibed Word.
Hate needs an object,
a thing not human,
to correct fairy stories
of red shoes dancing
on a loaf of bread,
sinking in slime
to the marsh woman's kingdom.
V.
Hate is a changeling
left on a doorstep
for an unbaptized child
clenching iron words
in a baking oven.
VI.
The words are memories I hate.
I long to scrape
them from my brain: a leucotomy
of my hate,
leaving me a truth:
Hate needs to be dead,
in my heart,
in my head.
My life on the cross
has already been done,
through a rip in the side
and the holes in hands and feet,
in the blood and water
flowing from forever.
