Two Poems

Return to St. Joseph’s Approaching Parkside from the park, I spot the cross above where, seven months ago, they took me in. Twelve hours of shooting skeletal pain with nothing but a saline drip and a single cup of water that tasted thick. They mapped my insides out with dyes and rays. Before I was conveyed into a half- million-dollar cross between a pop can and coffin, the lab tech kindly placed a lead shield over my crotch. Earlier, walking past triage, she’d given me this look like, You howling, screw- faced junkie, you won’t get to me. So why the change in disposition? Was the morphine kicking in? I had questions about organ donation and who I was supposed to call first.   After Anne Boyer Sometimes my blood has been drawn, and I am allowed to look at a printed page of its ingredients. Sometimes the body produces new samples, data, objects of study that, though unintelligible to me, undermine me at every turn. Platelets and liver enzymes might contradict my stated well-being on a scale of one to ten. Stool on the other hand is rated from one to six based on consistency, but here the nurses must be poets, too: if it’s ever pale or tarry, stringy, loose or flimsy, or if, conversely, it feels like a pine cone is coming out … Like preachers or string theorists, they traffic in metaphors for information two bodies can never really share. There is caring and providing care. I might sometimes remember who I am.