In the Evening Med Line
BY ELIZA GILBERT
Sometimes, Henry— Sometimes I can really believe
we were born here. The feeling’s brief and silver. It keens
like a needle in the dark. But when it comes, it comes
dead certain. It’s a stone-like smell; it’s an origin
quarry. One whiff and I know you ultrasonically.
Yesterday, or maybe tomorrow, I caught it in the hallway,
when the good nurse with the olive branch
tattoo slung cross and wise along her collarbone
reached out to adjust your tube, and you
rolled your big scared eyes and muttered, Thanks Mom.
And the good nurse said, Oh, please.
And smiled real. Sometimes, Henry, I think
we might refract each other. Like in the evening
med line, when every set of special socks starts
to scrabble against the speckle, and we’re Night
at the Museum-ing the womb-light. The cortices
are waltzing, Henry. What’s a togetherness
harder than swallowing at the same time?
Post-gulp, posthaste; we tumble toward the prelude,
the box step before the dip-and-whirl.
Paper cups of pill and pivot, the throat chalked
like a gymnast’s palms, and it’s bile dust,
then it’s gone, Henry. And Paige does a jump
like a bird falling. The dusk puckers; I can see
us from the outside of the group room, dangling
just beyond the plexiglass. In the wind, in the wind
-up, waiting for the oldest song. Proto-psychic,
halibut-mouthed when the Trazodone hits—
me, with the smudgy hair, and you, with the teeth
like cotton swabs, fuzzing up amnio. Hysterikos,
Annie whispers, making marbles of her sandwich crusts,
losing them under the dinner table. From the Greek,
“of the womb.” And if not born here, born where?
Hellhound Elegy
BY ELIZA GILBERT
So I let him play for me.
Unbolted the eyelids, watched
him hymn his way inside.
All anyone wants
is an enemy who can sing
them to sleep. & who cares
about the lyre? The boy
was enough. A weepy boy,
an exigent contralto. Skin
like saran-wrapped
sunfish. Enough.
Blood can be worn.
Can be sported. Blood
has no antonym
unless swallowed.
& what is there to be
if not hungry? Honey
cakes under the table,
capfuls of black brandy,
the inlet of an arrow
through the flank—I am
not above a tender ransom.
What’s your excuse?
What’s your damage
control policy? Mine
rambles about sleeping
dogs, bald ankles, titanium
accouterments. Nightly,
a presyncope in which
the skull-capped gates
come wired with a Ring camera,
& I am, at last, relieved.
Always awake. Always dreaming
of the staff, thunking
through tourmaline dust.
The fingernails settling
high on my middle
crown. Disambiguation
at a whisper: Good boy.
Then, like a downstairs Argos,
I might know him
well enough to leave him.
The sunrise. The uptake.
The aftertaste of a turned prophet.
These days, I am more
incinerator than not.
The visitors flicker
like doorknobs. They stay
or they are swallowed,
spick and span, dust
among dust. I am reaching
like a hand toward a taxi.
All of this woodsmoke, unwilded.
All of this cauterized mercy.
In this essay I will—
In this ashtray I will—
Who among us hasn’t
been loved, then vaporized
by a southbound shadow?
Sic. Stet. Epithet. I want, lord,
to become knuckle-sized.
To fit again, teething, keening,
in the palm of a handbasket.
Catechism With Hangnails
BY ELIZA GILBERT
When I tell you to forget, forget.
You were never sixteen, nor was the sky
pink as a scald before the blister.
Cheerios have no living soul and the Monopoly Man
never wore a monocle. When I tell you
that on 8th Street, there’s a massage parlor
that will change your life, consider
what it really is to change. Consider your life
as a baby mammoth, green and untaught
in its permafrost cubicle. Consider your own destruction
instinct. You know this much
about yourself: if you undertake a crapshoot,
any crapshoot, it will be like a martyr
undertaking a cause. All-in
before the chips are printed. Face-down,
swimming but you don’t know where,
imagining the lank corridor
of a manor at night. Do not look
for the groundskeeper, or the bloodless face
of the old clock in the hall. That house
will deglove you whole. Will have you hiding
in metonymy, bickering with cereal, hellbent
as some local girl missing
a spine. Instead, wash your hair. Gargle with salt
from the body of Lot’s wife.
The forgetting will be victimless
so long as the victim slights their designation.
So titrate. Overwash. Obliterate. Forget
in a big, uncatchable way. Remember
like Aesop must have remembered
his childhood; in adages and animals.
In gestures, skinny witticisms. Say wink-ishly
to the wax museum: A person can grope
around in the dark and it doesn’t make them
a prospector. A person can grope a girl
in the dark and it doesn’t make them king.
