Notes from the Isle of Langerhans
by Siham Karami
Drops of blood,
symbols of
the body’s vanished balancing.
Its scale dissolved,
the dial turned
to rising flood, each morsel
numbered
and reduced
to elemental measuring
whose chemist left
us all at sea —
our limping dogs,
our pirate logs,
our charts and tables
washed ashore,
where we lived
by tides, windblown fields
and sweeps of stars, until
shipwrecked: our sails flag
each daily calibration
gone awry, we drag
our calculations through
exhausting sand
to live by weighing
drops of blood.