my doctor’s folly

darling, darling – cerberus wheezes, and inside it is the smell of his pure smokes, snuffed and hanging heavy in the air.

in this acetylene paradise, i am the meek virgin, the hothouse orchid, the lecher’s baby – i am a lantern’s delicate glowing radiation, flickering off, on, off, on. the night trundles along outside, but in here – in this garden of indelible metal, my feverish cries bead and dissolve like paper on my tongue.

he thinks of himself as god, as a light eating the days from the rounded heat of my body, but god hurts the world in elements, not in love. his kiss is my head gated under water. his flush is an anchored body choking. three deaths in an hour. there is no devil, not in here – hiroshima’s ash coating was a man’s sin. darling, darling.

in this paradise, the fever always holds.

(Note: Diction taken from Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath)

Abbie Allison is an emerging writer and poet from Hanceville, Alabama, infatuated with themes that work through grief, girlhood, religion, and southern culture. She is a current undergraduate student at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she studies criminology and writes opinion articles for The Crimson White. Her fiction work can be found in The Reprise.