by Nicole Reinert
1.
On Learning to Hate Other People's Happiness
The pulse on the inside crook
of my little finger
panting, panting.
A doctor visited the house today.
He sat by my bed to take my history,
his wedding band etched—surprisingly—with stars,
the final detail which exhausted me.
2.
Will to Live
Suddenly, word of new hope—
a clinic in Switzerland.
Too sick to take a bath
let alone board an airplane,
I eye the pamphlet greedily—
my bones lean toward it,
wheat stalks in storm winds.
3.
On Knowing When It's Time to Start Worrying
The whispering of my caregivers
grows louder each day
until the plaintive hiss
tendrils up my bedposts
like vines.
Each time the word She,
another thorn.
4.
Query
I smell rice cooking
and think of crematoria
where rows of bodies
burn, and the way each one
sits up that one last time,
a final reflex when the tendons dry and shorten.
What I would give to know,
when they sit up like that,
if it is merely physics,
or if it is
in protest.
5.
Nocturne
They thought it was mice
all night in the ceiling.
I didn't let on that my heart
up in the attic, shredding itself
will sound like the utilitarian
scampering of tiny feet.
6.
Field Work
If before we are born we each choose our life's mission,
then drink from the waters of forgetfulness,
I must have thought Show me what it is to be wretched and utterly alone.
Then lowered my kiss to the crystalline idiot-pool.
7.
Coming Closer
"He who would save his life must lose it." –Christ, The Gospels
No, I will not take my own life.
There is art inside of me which insists,
each night, on the following morning.
It is parasitic, its intent on getting made
swells and fills me until I am nothing
more than a shell, a host to this foreign
organism, this total integrity.
8.
On the Nature of Suffering
This pang of tenderness toward the other patients
worries me—
If I would not yet kick in their faces to free myself
it must mean I'm only lowered half-way down the mine-shaft.
9.
Hair Makeup and Heels
Together they comprised my one perfect thrill.
I coddled my vanity openly.
Lately, though, I have joined the invisible caste
that does not wear shoes at all.
The colors, salves, and charms have scattered like millipedes.
Too sick for the bath, I have cut off my dirty hair with kitchen shears.
When I weep with the shock of this new life,
my lips go red and sultry.
Now beauty, along with the nightsweats and fevers,
comes and goes and won't be handled.
10.
Silk Pajamas at Christmas
Sets of flannel pajamas have already arrived.
But something about pale yellow
silk stamped with irises
feels eerily like graduating.
I tried for so long to keep this in its box.
Now my grandmother with her one murky eye
leans in saying open it.
12.
Playing the Tin Whistle
You ask me again when I will recover.
Instead, I describe how I taught myself to trill
so the note hooks upward, then drunkenly swoons,
then rights itself and holds steady. All I can promise
is that it is truly a lovely, haunting effect.