like electricity. Who can blame it
for being here first? Some days,
on the metro, I can hardly bear
not touching my lips to the neck of whomever’s
in front of me: so-and-so’s frail nape, his grim
mole, her translucent hairs. So much
can happen to the body. Sciatica,
waterboarding, migraines, rubber
bullets, melanoma, severed hands mis-paired
in plastic bags and flung to the part
of the highway we call shoulder—
I know the list’s flippancy
is dangerous, that pain inflicted and organic are
unequal. But both are pain.
I’m more religious than I used to think,
or something. I expect my turn. I brush
A.’s back with my fingertips as if
he were already wounded; I want to know
if I possess the kind of salve
I know this life will call for. There are bones
that ache forever, eyes blotted out by nitric
acid, groins sundered in childbirth,
a woman I knew from sixth-grade typing class
who died after subsisting on black coffee for longer
than the lifespan of a periodic cicada.
My physical therapist tapes my kneecap with electrodes
neat as miniature lily pads. My muscles shudder.
Later, she uses a needle, and I cry out with a sound
I’ve never made in front of anyone
who has never been inside me. I’m sorry, she murmurs,
steady even then, Forgive me, I’m sorry.
What happens to the human cells
that are looked upon with love? And to the ones that do
the looking? There was an afternoon
with A. in a room on the coast; we
lay in bed with the whole
of our skins almost motionless against each other,
almost glowing, a couple hours before the sunburn remembered
to hurt us. And we looked at each other. Look,
gout-swell. Look, arm-stump. Look, cesarean scar,
frostbite, knife-wound, and you too, soft sternum still
intact, behold the blood invisible, feel
your own clean thrum. Today, I’m thirty.
This is the gift I am giving my body.
This is the gift I am giving my body.
