Hypochondriac
You rarely feel the symptoms
of an inside-out shirt.
Maybe a stray itch sprouts at your nape
as you back out of the driveway.
A tug under your arm
when you reach for the top shelf.
But you carry on just fine.
You won’t feel it coming, that swift sting
of awareness: tag wagging like a tongue,
caught by a mirror or a mouthy colleague.
A collar of flush spreads across your neck
at having felt clear as water, looking like mud.
Frantic fingers check —
jacket arms, pant seams,
sock cuffs, pant seams again —
long after the mirror reassures you.
But you know better
than to trust glass.
You dress.
Redress.
Undress.
Stand in the clouded bathroom,
steam beading your neck,
trying to tell yourself
that you’re zipped up right.
But it’s too late.
You already know,
clothed or not,
you may never believe
your body again.
*
Flight Path
Weeks after my mother says not to tell anyone
about the colitis,
I sit in seat 29B,
five hours and thirty-five minutes
from the fog necklace around San Francisco.
Beside me, a boy my age.
As the horizon tilts, we open each other’s lives
like pumpkins: lids sliced clean,
then suddenly, elbows plunged into pulp and string.
What strange costumes we wear,
ones that mask only our peels
but lay bare our guts. My gut.
An hour in, we’ve scooped
its ulcered flesh clean,
onto the tray table between us. We devour it.
When the eating uncorks me,
I say bathroom.
I watch how swiftly
those knees swing aside,
faster than my mother’s ever have.
*
Preeti Talwai writes from California, where she’s also a research leader in human-centered technology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, 100-Word Story, Diode Poetry, HAD, and Typehouse Magazine, among others. She is the author of a chapbook, Chronic (Bottlecap Press). Find her at preetitalwai.com
Excellent poems – and I have (once) gone to work in two different shoes without noticing for hours, so I can relate to the first poem very well!
I love these poems. The language and metaphors are fresh and original. This is an excellent first line to any poem or story. This line immediately pulls me into the poem, wanting to know the symptoms, the feel. And the momentum of that first line is carried throughout the poem, one great line to the next:
“You rarely feel the symptoms
of an inside-out shirt.”
Another great first stanza in the second poem, “Flight Path.” The description of the fog, the image of a Saturn-like necklace around San Francisco is so powerful in regards to imaging. And again, not a cliche in sight.
Weeks after my mother says not to tell anyone
about the colitis,
I sit in seat 29B,
five hours and thirty-five minutes
from the fog necklace around San Francisco.
Amazing, inspiring work!