unperfect.

there are things i thought i would never forget,
like listening to them count the numbers and letters of your spine,
t-2, c-7, 45, 98!
and how the doctor smiled and looked at my boobs
when he told me you were in surgery.

the awful ugly human smell of the mortuary came with me into my car,
and i thought how stupid you looked embalmed,
how i felt nothing as they put you in the ground.
(i just wanted to go home and boil your fingers to the bone
so i could memorize the way they played over my skin).

i didn’t want to see the awful small things that haunted you,
like the pictures they took of the cracks in your teeth,
the scrapings of your flesh they took away and forgot to give back to me,
the long terrible rips in your jeans from the surgical scissors
they used to cut your pants off.

i saved the small intravenous needles that still had your blood on them,
blindfolded myself in the last remnants of your underwear,
remembered how you screamed:
an animal only just realizing it is going to be slaughtered.

i saw you laid bare.
after watching your heart beating in the operating theater,
i tried my best to smother you so you wouldn’t have to live another day.

sometime later, the doctors found me trying to slip my fingers inside your stitches,
so i could know exactly what you felt like before you died.



author's note: i am going to start adding notes to some poems i post, because some of what i write needs context. (i am also trying to post more). this poem was written almost a year ago, after a trip to the hospital, and edited this summer and fall, after receiving news of some of my colleagues' untimely deaths. loss is a theme i come back to again and again, but this poem is a lot harsher than much of what i have written about it. sorry if there is any discomfort or bad memories involved, but that is sort of the point. this wasn't about anybody in particular when first written, and it was a lot less creepy then, but the character in this poem has sort of taken on a life of her own. she may reappear. - n.

a compass rose/facing north.

days of onyx.
i remembered another of your amber dreams,
my voice, amplified for the worlds to hear.

terrifying: sadnesses, known to all.
your blue-gold bodies, red and electrifying.

i haven’t felt in so many years, in days, days
(do you remember what happened at the end of time?)

true love. mi amor.

day of onyx, night of jewels.
a map of the world.
nights of shining like the sun can’t sleep,
the north pole midyear.
borealis over manhattan.

in my dreams the wide blue sea,
filled with my salvation.
redemption.

there is nothing to understand.
i may be lost, and you found.

all my years weigh on me – the setting sun.
grace.
how little i speak.