Ablation
They wheeled me in while a nurse said she liked my stripy socks. That was the last clean sentence I heard. Before, the doctor said Cooked and Cure and Pilot. The room was sharp and silent. I woke up three times. I was machine. I was equation. My mouth was sticky when I tried to say Stop and groaned. They kicked me back under. The tech said Get it yet? The doc said No. He said it wouldn’t hurt, but I was all alien and probe. A spaceship built wrong. Earth fell. A strange drum played on. I was mutation, stretched from muzzle to toe. I came to in a bright room. The doctor said Close and AV node. A puppeteer strung my EKG. I slept and woke and tried to get up. My heart auditioned beats. The nurse caught me. She held me like a doll, soft at the seams. My voice box dropped and rolled along the floor.
*
Letter from the Barber Shop
It’s when my barber says she almost tore through
her hand with a chainsaw that I think about death—
how it might come blundering like blindfolded men groping
different parts of an elephant, declaring This is it! No, this is it!,
or knowingly like when the Florida cop caught me going
twenty over, saying Do you know how fast that was?
and my thinking, Yes—it was by design. Why do I take great pleasure
in cracking sometimes? Is it control I mistake for freedom,
like a dog baring its teeth, still leashed? Yes, there’s a thrill
in the not-quite, in the almost. Even now, I replay my barber’s laugh—
how casually she said blood and root and earth. How surprising
we can be and how wondrous it would be for Christ to actually come,
despite my early atheism, not cloaked in the chaos of trumpet-sound
but silence, the kind that drips through drywall, the hallway light
turned on not to accuse but to awaken. Isn’t interruption
what we fear most? The Where have you been? Your hands
smelling like nicotine and whiskey. Grace not so much a ladder
but a nurse saying, Silly you—now, you won’t do that again, will you?
*
Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.
