Sensitive

 

​

Riddled with food allergies

highly sensitive to a plethora of chemicals

Rhonda hovers as high above the surface of this planet

as she can

too painfully reactive to alight on any surface

but the back of her horse

 

or her sheets

when she has a lover

who has scrubbed himself thoroughly  

 

Though she feels only contempt for western medicine

preferring the paths trod

by the shaman

she has now been conditioned

nearly to orgasm

by the scent of Chlorohexidine

the pink-tinted two percent solution

used on patients about to undergo surgery

 

Sex with her is sometimes like

undergoing surgery

because she can be almost knife-like

the way she gets on top and attacks

 

She makes her lovers her dance partners

so they’d better be fast on their feet

Her favorite was Miguel

He had the tropics in his toes

but also a persistent case

of athlete’s foot

The medicated spray he used

sent her immune system into Red Alert

 

But she’s not fragile

Fleeing a music festival

she picked up her fungal Trinidad-and Tobago-born paramour

and carried him across a river

 

But when she got to the far shore and found him

pressed against her chest

sucking his thumb

she unceremoniously dumped him onto the rocky bank

So much for Miguel

 

If only Rhonda had known that his ancestral island

was home to nearly two thousand species of fungi

she would never have taken up with him

 

Rhonda tells herself: I should have kept celibate

I am going back to being celibate

I will never expose myself to the filthy

and profane again

 

When they return to her home

Rhonda throws Miguel’s pan drums

onto her front lawn

Then she gallops her horse

to the golf course which adjoins her property

and tears up greens #16 and 17

 

She hates the golf course

which disturbs her sleep with mowing

and aggressive watering

and tons of herbicides and pesticides

which cause her epileptic fits