Bleach and ammonia combine to make chloramine. I’m no poet of high modernism, no polyglot in the trenches with wool underwear. I’m a middle-aged man with slimy fingers in yellow gloves, removing spiral hairs from the base of the toilet, hallucinating mustard gas. Here in the bathroom, I am somehow rare. On my hands and knees, preoccupied with the absurd heroism of a domestic chore. Is this an abased version of my true self or is this who I am? A brittle assembly of porous carbon. I scrape tiny particles of gray disjecta from the mirror, its constellation of interference. Everywhere the body’s output of thread, flesh, & disease. I picture worms in my lungs, the branching of colors. My wad of blueish paper towel, my fist. Hypochlorous acid in particular is a powerful oxidizing agent. Its effect is sometimes described as an inflammatory cascade. Being one of nature’s balloons, I exchange another sculpture of flute-notes with the world before tethering my throat again. The communism of breath, the palpable finitude of giving or keeping it. We are woven in gas, repeatedly. This inversion of planthood, braiding the invisible into my cells and dreams, a frequency of interrelation. It does not come from our hearts but from circulation. We used to sprint in the sprinkler’s iridescence, breathing thirsty gulps of oxygen. Now I squeeze the trigger on the Windex. Behind resilient tooth flicks, reflection of a flushed man trying to hold something impossible to hold. The futile war against the body’s attrition, something between suffocation and hope.