The Cure

The Cure

Grace Crocker

My teeming tummy of moths
prescribe me bottles of unwanted projections,
the flaming prognoses of cancer-like fear.

Leave me be, I’ve screamed more than once
in an attempt to outlive my disease.

But these unanswered why’s tease me;
They remind me you’re a ticking time bomb,
primed to terminate me like you’ll perhaps
terminate you.

Should this break me?
This,
this soulless, cubed page of numbers and lines
that seem to dictate mankind
as its ironfisted despot?

Will these hours and months
I spend as the unlucky frog pinned to
a gurney of cruel fate
mandate
every thing?

I could just give up, you know,
my worst version growls.

But when you’re on a doorless train
set on endless tracks,
or waiting for someone else to die
just to replace your own heart,

giving up is just
imagining you dead in my arms
for the hundredth time.

It’s
the inability to sink no lower
than the bottom of the barrel;

it’s wanting the cancer to kill me,
and to do it quickly.

But these remedies,
holistic yet well-meaning,
masquerade as placebo elixirs,
butter smeared over burns,
basal oils dabbed on festering tumors.

I can’t let this kill me.

For if fire wasn’t meant for warmth,
then why does it burn?

And if I wasn’t meant to fight for you,
then why am I your mother?

The moths dissipate when
the snake appears.
They know my hellfight well
because they watched it slithering closer
after all this time—

—and time,
the venomous antidote,
is both cause and cure.

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Grace Crocker
Creative Writing Professor

Grace is an assistant professor at a private college in Florida, where she teaches English and creative writing. Her articles and poetry, which often discuss family, education, and multiculturalism, have been published both locally and internationally.

Photography by Rendy Novantino