A light shines her eye. The skeptochete cannot exist chronically, the woman says depressing her tongue inaudible Calendula screams until her uvula twitches against popsicle stick. Her mother at home, malaises. Sips droppers of witches’ brew, rubs essential oils in teeth. So ill herself someone must believe the skeptochete is real. The nurse slides a pamphlet across steel tray into Calendula’s cold fingers. Mid-May California has not seen rain so dry she licks her salted thumb to turn the pages. Doctors scam patients out of money scrawled in red, her heart jangles. The Ferryman pulls the nurse aside, inaudibly demands she try again.  

A four-year-old taken from his parents waits four days for social services to declare the mark of the skeptochete behind his swollen knee is no human doing, el diablo en seis patas mouths barbed teeth diagnoses Calendula’s father twenty years too late. Eroding bone, sound, and memory, doctors install a treatment tube, accidently into his brain. The Ferryman slows his speech and winces; for months no one notices. 

An old white couch blooms bulls-eye rashes. Her neighbor’s lips too embarrassed, too sick to speak, marked by the skeptochete. A decade passes old pile of abalone grey at dusk as water retreats land so dry Calendula’s temperature rises. A golden lab pushes the lawnmower. Nettles sting her ankles, purple beans snap fingers. Pumpkin vines entwine, diving rods in search of healing waters. Anything to drink. Vows bloom yellow squash blossoms, to think one day she would have answers.

Fed tubes and needles, sand and glass, Calendula missed so much class she never imagined returning to college. In the quarry, the slim old scholar who lives in a converted wine barrel insists she recite from memory Aristophanes Euripides probably something from The Clouds––a lampooning of intellectual fashions a stage fright never ‘til now on a sea of wordless stringing. The Ferryman checks his watch, winds three seconds back, licks his finger to the wind. Brain fog most days circles Pacific waters past noon. 

Amy holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she founded Wisdom Body Collective. She is an editor of More Revolutionary Letters: A Tribute to Diane di Prima. Her work can be read in Entropy, Vol1 Brooklyn, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. @amybobeda on twitter.