Good Faith

I invented things

you discovered

& took. This

is only what

happened, not

how it felt.

Always there's

a part of the story

we'd rather leave

out. Motives, arrows

thrown about

like trash, like ghosts.

I came when you

called for me:

I only wanted

to help.

variations on the epithalamium

I really like this poem by Brenda Shaughnessy. It's called epithalament.

A few years ago, a wrote a few poems that I called "epithalamianagrams." I wrote these for friends who were getting married. The idea was to compose a poem that used only the letters in their names -- to use anagrams to symbolize their marriage. Those poems were incredibly satisfying and fun to write.

Recovery is the New Category

& there are new types of victories. The pill countdown, the pain's clean edge, tart and bright as a razor -- so defined, no longer muffled or suffuse. It dwindles to this hard clean edge the glows like neon in the dark. I am aware of parts of my body & I search for pictures: networks and ribbons. And there are phantoms that wander over my skin, a new type of radiculopathy -- syndrome spreading sensations from point a to point b -- something is felt where nothing touches. & there's a pulse to it, like waves.

post post-op

a thing happens like turning down the corner of the page, and the next page is there. a turning down that feels a bit like a seeing through. a counting down of pills. dreams of apple trees growing inside silver, financial cones. a sort of institutionalized kindness that is just good enough. just seeing through. how the disembodied becomes you again. yes, this is my head, my hair. I'm seeing through. I try to wear jeans, but the incision seam is still there, up my back like a zipper, the plastic stitches underneath my skin. For weeks, it bubbled. "an allergic reaction." this is what my surgeon said. my surgeon? I want to ask him what he saw when he looked inside me. I want to say "describe it." I feel shy asking questions, ask my husband to take notes. In the car, I ask him over and over, "what else did he say?" and "how did I seem?" How do I seem? Am I here? The bottles collect like...a snowdrift of bottles -- everything in the orange RX. but recovery is the new category.