Some of the best poems you'll read - Perigee

"There are Birds Flying in my Vagina"
by Alex Cigale
At the nursing home where I work, a woman
lies tied down to her bed with rubber restraints.
"You all look like whores!" she scolds the nurses.
Accusing them of wearing too much make up
she imagines cabals, orgies with doctors,
becomes obsessed with her bowel movements:
"They are stealing the stool from my bed pan
and using it to smear the walls!" It seems
all the stars in the sky have disappeared,
the channels on her TV remote were retuned
to station zero and funereal music pumped
like gas into the garishly painted room—
all the cruel tricks an oxygen-starved mind
plays on the old. And then Edith's last words;
"There are birds flying in my vagina."
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