Medicine
art by JJ Cromer
by AJ Bermudez
But of course I want your teeth in my pussy,
who wouldn’t?what idiot would not want
your papillae / nail beds / germ-junked saliva all over their holey-of-holies?
If an altar falls in the woods
and no one hears it,
[you know the rest].
But, Philosapphy 101:
Can’t a thing be ugly and splendid at once?
a riled-up mess of sex / longing / medicine
the way a brain looks on the ground
If not,
please tell me now
because I’ve seen how a heart looks up close
viscous and sweating,
gamey, fatty, lewd
a marvel what stays intact
what swells
what rips
what pumps
what leaks
One thing’s for sure:
blood everywhere.
If anything falls, anywhere,
who cares about the sound?
No matter what,
it’s fallen.
This is it, bête noire,
bitter pill,
baby cliché,
and it is a splendid, ugly thing
A. J. BERMUDEZ is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in New York. Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, Sundance, SXSW, the LGBTQ+ Toronto Film Festival, and in a number of literary publications, including The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Story, Electric Literature, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She is a former boxer and EMT, a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist and 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow, and a winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Diverse Voices Award, the Page Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
J.J. Cromer and his family live on a small farm in central Appalachia, where they’ve kept bees, geese, ducks, and chickens. Self-taught as an artist, he holds a bachelor's degree in history and two master's degrees — in English and library science. His art is held in the permanent collections of the American Visionary Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Taubman Museum of Art, and the American Folk Art Museum, among others.
