I Had A Tapeworm

I had a tapeworm, and imagined it flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps, pallid red, a quarter-inch wide with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes peeking out of my asshole as I lolled in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool (the kind that used to be in inner-city Ys: windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither seen nor heard of for thirty years were saying I’d give everyone in the pool my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten my insides and now had threaded through both my intestines and was trying to get out. Where were we? Everyone was old, old— gray, infirm; flaccid and thin or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping— the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps and black one-piece suits as if we were all on an outing from a nursing home. I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was, but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty, as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair after cheating on the lover you were cheating on your husband with, who was at that moment waiting for you in another motel room from which you had slipped to meet me secretly: a secret inside a secret, buried, encased, as if if we dug deep enough into it we’d find what we were trying to get or stop.