Because there are no disposal laws for syringes                in this state, I keep a bleach jug packed with syringes.Once, in a dry-lipped fugue, I dropped two pens                in a new one; now the laundry is blood-fracked with syringes.Even so, I believe it’s clean coming out of the dryer.                The white-coated vampire states it as fact: syringesrinse the surgeries away. She’s got a house to feed,                where tiny mouths drool fluid like primed syringes.I’m not dying yet, but she wants to be sure.                She asks me to deliver a ransom of syringes.Labs, she calls them: needle-nosed hounds dispatched                by her keyboard; she doesn’t actually handle syringes.Instead, she sends me to a different wing. The phlebotomists                thump the anticoagulant in my syringes:stop telling people that ain’t your hair when you bought it.                They pull blood but inject beauty—compassionate syringes.On the drive home, the guardrails look like casket lowerers;                lane markings, a mortician’s stitch; the cars blunt syringeshunting out home, the vena cava, in which I brine                a life, my flesh as seasoned by syringesas my mother’s holiday turkeys. I’m suspended between                every ancestor who lived or treasoned with syringes.Their ghosts OD in my dreams; riddled with holes,                they beg me to remember their names. I ask which syringescould bring them back to life. I awaken                to track marks under my nose. A new plot of syringesdampens on the front steps. I am destined to infuse                survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.