YOU LIE
BY JANINE JOSEPH
“Rep. Joe Wilson shocked many observers Wednesday night when he shouted, ‘You lie!’ after the president denied that health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants.”
– CNN.com, 2009
And so what if I didn’t die. Blood
for no reason I thought it was cancer
in the toilet bowl. I was nineteen,
if that’s what you’re thinking,
and had experience saying goodbye
to someone whose body couldn’t hear me.
I kept my head until we reached the pool
and segued into a story about my birthplace
and how my nails were all turtles swimming
back to land. What I was trying to say
was that my aunt was an American citizen
who lived as long as she did because
she always took down the Christmas tree.
The water we put our feet into
was the neighborhood’s crater
and I’m sure those going to bed heard me
because I said I wasn’t one
to cry, and so he should listen.
Every ornament was an ovary she boxed,
but what I had to say had nothing to do
with dying. She wasn’t my aunt
by blood, after all, and my medical history
was an unidentified coastline. I said I am
in trouble. If there was ever something
wrong in me, I couldn’t see anyone,
just to check. Do you understand?
He understood as much as you
and who was to blame.
The Part of the Water
BY JANINE JOSEPH
When the water levels were low I drove
to the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake
thinking again about having lost the spelling bee
on the word rustle, spelling instead, and slowly,
wrestle into the microphone’s foam.
One folding metal seat left occupied behind me,
the crowd waiting—what had I imagined I heard
in the trees? With my grief counselor I talk about hallucinating,
as a child, a double on the dashboard and my double
would say, “Don’t you say a word,”
though I’d already be looking past myself
and at the horizon of taillights reddening.
It is possible to have been this way even then.
Even then it is possible something split in me
the first time I lied myself a citizen.
At the tilt of a head, was I the young woman
or the old, the duck or the rabbit in the optical
illusion? After the accident I turned out
all of the lights in the room while I watched,
concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a fever
with nothing on the tip of my tongue. I imagine
from a distance the glare off the water desiccated me.
