Self-Cadenazos

They took me to the curandera
because I had TB.

She smeared some kind of manteca
on my John Keats chest.

My lungs got fat and sluggish.
The gringo doctor said uh oh.

He recommended pills and surgery.
Rodrigo his gay male nurse offered paperwork.

Beeswax in the ear, honey-stings in the eye,
could poetry save me from the saw?

My lungs (the two flat tortillas you see before you)
sucked in the air extraordinaire again.

I don’t really know which brujas cured me,
or whose poetic career I wound up with.