To the Queasy Feeling in the Pit of My Stomach

You were with me the night before,
when I was prepping with big glasses
of Gatorade and Miralax.

But you weren’t there when I woke up
in the procedure room—not even
when the nurse asked if I had “passed gas”

yet and told me to try. You weren’t with me when
Jen came, smiling, to wait for the doctor with me.
As we sat there chilling and laughing,

we both thought we knew the drill—everything
would have looked pretty much ok, with maybe a touch
of that intestinal condition beginning with a “d”

that I can never remember the name of.
and maybe some polyps had been snipped,
but the biopsies would come back negative.

You started to come back to me
when the doctor arrived and we saw
the thinness of his smile and felt the clamminess

of his hand shaking ours. You were with me
for sure when he said “I don’t have good news”
and started using words like “malignant” and “colectomy.”

Speaking of words…let’s not mince them
—I’ve never liked you very much.
Sometimes you make me want to vomit.

But right then, you were welcome—so welcome.
You’ve always been with me–when I was taking an algebra test,
or smelling chlorine before I learned to swim—whenever

there was a burden I thought I couldn’t bear.
I don’t like you, but I know you,
and you are mine, and you are me—

not this other, hidden one, riding along.

*

Self-Portrait of a Breathless Reader

After the surgery, I felt more embodied
than I had thought possible. And I didn’t like it.

I could feel, with HD cinematic clarity, a tiny drop
of acid looming at the bottom of my right sinus,
slithering down, threatening to drop unto my epiglottis
and trigger another round of the violent
hiccups that ripped through my belly so hard that I might
tear my new seams open, even as liquid
boulders of phlegm began to block
my nose and throat. When I tried to breathe
deeply and slowly to calm myself, I could feel
the air slipping through a tiny crease at the base
of my septum, as if plunging into oblivion.

I imagined myself like the little sparrow that Jen and I
had once found in front of our door;
we didn’t know how to help, but we witnessed
as it released an impossibly graceful and soft
burp—surrendering its spirit.

In an oasis of logic
in my brain, I knew I was I wasn’t going to die of phlegm
and hiccups; but it was like how a bad
acid trip must feel—maybe the result
of all that fentanyl that poured through me during
seven and a half hours on the table. I didn’t’ trust
the oasis–for oases hold mirages–but I did know
that talking seemed to ease the hiccups,
and that if I was talking I must be breathing.

So, in the middle of the night, when even Jen,
my ever-vigilant love, had succumbed to sleep
and there was no one to talk to, I opened
Sean Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire and started reading,
stumbling through the hiccups at first, but feeling my throat
open as I moved through the poems, feeling Hewitt’s
voice move through me, reawakening my own voice,
my own spirit. And soon I was thinking not of surviving,
but of Hewitt’s mushroom field and dark abysses and sudden

stars. I never knew how spiritual poetry could be
until it became a way of keeping the mere body alive.

*

Brian O’Sullivan is an English professor and inaugural Chair of LEAD Seminars at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His poems and haiku have been published in ONE ART, Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing, contemporary haibun online, Lighten Up Online and other journals. He wrote these two poems shortly before and after being operated on back at the end of April, and he wants you to know that he’s doing well now.