The Medicine Issue
Oxford Literary Review
Jamie Cameron and Rupa Wood in response to Emil Ciroan
Poetry
The Gods
"The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased…”
— Emil Cioran
Sometimes I discover I've been thinking about the night
I slipped and split my temple on the spot the basin
and bath meet. How I lay there like an aquarium emptying,
watching my blood thread a course along the grout.
How later you rushed in, embarrassed suddenly to see me naked,
and wrapped me in the plastic curtain, an Aztec priest
preparing my body for unspeakable ceremonies:
the weight of a heart… a fragment of the sun's heat
I wanted my life in your hands. In the tub the bubbles pinked.
Jamie Cameron
"The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased, to offer them human blood every day in order the keep the universe from sinking back into chaos. We long since ceased to believe in the gods, and we no longer offer them sacrifices. Yet the world is still here, no doubt. Only now we can no longer explain why it does not collapse on the spot.”
— Emil Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
The Gods
With your life in my hands
the night on the bathroom floor
increasing the distance between us
held only by threads
of a bleeding language
beneath the flower pattern
of the expanding universe
came a sign
that I will lie down with you
under some future stone
wrapping the plastic sheet
I clutched your body
possessed by a world
with nothing more
than this tacit agreement
doubtless the world is still here
for I have played the Gods and won
Rupa Wood