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