i. fifteen months my brother, head too wide for thin hips, had been extracted with a scalpel. the new nurse pressed the afterbirth out of her belly and she screamed. i screamed longer. ii. eight years i smoothed my brother's hair while i held him alone on grandmother's stained couch and told him mom wasn't dead, just blown up like a red balloon, tongue swollen into silence. i thought i was lying. iii. sixteen years when she couldn't carry her own spine, i held her purse and followed her rented scooter through the grocery store. she backed beeping into the fresh pie display and, jointly splashed with raspberries, we exploded in laughter. iv. twenty-one years bracing one foot against the porcelain, i fished my mother out of the bathtub when she had taken one pill too many and her blood had split apart. she was coated in spilled shampoo but i tucked her into bed and talked to her about the attractive weatherman on channel thirteen news, until she asked to be helped outside for a cigarette.
Tag: medical
Losing Teeth
In the naked bulb light, your shielding shoulder doesn't hide your reflection's study of its teeth, apprehensive, the close-clinging film a death sentence and now whimsically, your flowered hair like seaweed over my upturned face, brushing the blanket copper-stained & electric, & your voice oakly shadowed and plastic like you practice & my mouth is too stuffed to say what I want, so instead I offer a smile and the fishing hook in my lip and a wish that you hadn't asked me to be your doll, fluffed by petticoats and beestung lips, to be kept in the living room, in the dentist's chair
Faint
with my veins churning into vials, someone else's family is leaning over me hiding me from the nurse's needle --my vision balloons, filling empty space with the sterile blue curtain cliff and the grandmother is telling me that my hair looks like lake ice, like blackberries, like her dead daughter's dishes and the grandfather turns to me, dirge-tempo, (i have been told that his cells are eating him but he is doing alright) and he stuffs my eye sockets with gauze
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