1.
I suppose once
I had a father and a brunette mother
a partially South American family
sitting at another table
the realization
that somehow
I would never be quite
the same
there’s a chair in one corner
and if I don’t look around the room
flecks of dust move across my line of sight
for 10 days I took a different name
we all wore short sleeve shirts
during those teenage years
but tonight
I am without a body
without arms to show off
the incessant beeping
a man appeared in the doorway
and he grew to be my brother
Jack
I taught him to sew through black vinyl
what is my fate?
and it’s true I heard grown men calling
for their mothers
a lurid lullaby
a train derailed
somewhere in the dark
I’m not this room
where people lie awake breathing
I wasn’t wheeled in here last night
but my Ohio years
my roaming years all
brought me home to the globe
in my father’s head
this room is in me now
all emptied out
officers in plain clothes
enjoying a dinner together
complete with root beer and cake
and I’ve carved out a small hole in the light
among skeletons
the women entering and exiting
with their sorbet hair
and children festooned to their backs
the children I would never have
what is my fate?
the twisted bodies
the ICU is—
full of breath
like wind that makes discarded newspaper
dance
my aunt arrived
she was standing in the doorway
while our country was being torn apart
am I so sick as to warrant prayer?
I remembered the boys I grew up with
the ones with the guitars around their necks
in my memory mist they become horseflies
they bite and suck bits of blood
until ultimately
they are swatted down
and crushed under an open palm
my father was up all night playing chess
with no one
the room so full of flowers
visitors could no longer sit
nurses called their friends
I was able to see New York again
through glass
while my family took turns
sitting alone in the Jeep
the body suspended
burning up good green money
but months later
after suffering the loss
of someone like you—
I realized no one really
expected anything of the body
my brother watched Catholics
enter and exit a church that night
no one asked why he was there
or where he came from
a man illuminated in the doorway light
but let me tell you
it’s night where I am
I could see my name
up on the marquee
until a taxi arrived and took me away
and I called my mother
by the time I woke up
a cold wind
needle marks and machines
2.
The oblong body
with jewelry on its chest
while worrying the signs
the ward is lifeless tonight
like dead letters gathering
dust and mold
pulling apart
the contraptions
the tethers
three or four silent women
I saw my grandfather
at the diner on the corner
as he read a newspaper
dated 1969
I was in a hospital gown
he was still young and in a three-piece suit
I left too much behind to reclaim he said
figures moving across the room in white
the items left behind
you’re not going to die tonight he said
folding the newspaper
sit with me a while
I rested my hands in cold water
in the dark
I felt someone drowning
or crossing 7th Avenue
the nurse left her handprint in my arm
she yanked my gown down below my breasts
and never returned
the backlogged children
I saw my brain for the first time
on machines
think of the battered and bruised visage
of the two thousand twenties
the very foundations
the topsoil lost to the wind
the murdered fathers
the carved flesh
dangling from metal hooks
conversations in the room
like I was never there
the oblong body
six-point star on its chest
knives in its arms
the marathon runners frighten me the most
with their unshakable confidence
that their bodies won’t betray
patches of music
in passing cars
and outside there will be
people running in shorts
crumbling brick and battered cement
and friends who have traveled from far away
for dinner
the radio said
if you’re listening now
you still aren’t home
sometimes I get so blinded
by the harsh conditions
the arms and legs filled with rock
my brother’s voice on the phone
twenty-six years of snow
in one backyard
and the gunshot fates
of the kids I grew up with
Laura’s hands mourning my brain
in a way it’s incomprehensible
how much space the body occupies
and all the buildings erected to house it
and I am wailing into machines
because there were still restaurants I wanted to try
I heard a fire truck roar around the corner
when I said you could build
an entire country
on the back of a cigarette
my father agreed
men walked into the room
in clothes more fitting for fighting fires
with my tangled fingers
and staccato breaths
there wasn’t any siren
somewhere down the hall
a radio still playing
enduring the isolation of
what’s the name of that song?
to an empty room
I hit my head on the bathroom wall
and pissed myself that night
and Laura held my body until the
metal doors closed
navigating these prisms
stepping down hallways
on these ghost ships
3.
My family left me
for the night
before a ball of flame
tore down the door
god knows where
and what kind of damage
months later I’d see you dead—
my grandmother used to
de-thaw pieces of frozen bologna
she held her arm outstretched
as the car sped
crossing the highways and thoroughfares
I tried to explain how this memory
of meaningless joy
could possibly make up for the
devastation to come
like an opera singer
with vocal chords
recently ripped and removed
I tried to explain many things
the loss of someone close to me
like you
like my body
the amount of vacant space left
in your absence and
the amount of space mine took up
the muscles worn down
giving way to flapping skin
but losing you—
has made the travesty of
the two thousand twenties
seem insignificant
from the day my left hand froze and swelled
to last night when I threw a green glass bottle
just to watch it shatter
did the nurse say
she was going to make a torture
chamber out of me?
my hands grasp-less
and I wept on the floor
yelled for my mother while
sitting in a puddle of my own piss
that night I would
I watch Laura grow smaller and smaller
as I sped
through lights and metal doors
and I thought about when I first saw Laura
6 years earlier
thin, blonde, in baggy jeans
I never wanted anything more
at 3 AM
I was dying
I sat up like Christina in
Andrew Wyeth’s world
for 27 hours I blended into the noise
joining the chorus
the grown men on the ward
howled for
their mothers
a resident asked me if
I wanted to be saved
should my heart stop
I blew spit bubbles to pass the time
by Tuesday
semi-reclining on the bed in a treeless world
a mostly tawny colored room
I looked up at the searing
fluorescents dotting
my line of sight
that night I
met my grandfather again
the one who survived the Holocaust
through a Kepra, Adivan and Morphine tether
connected by
a death unplanned
I’d go on to dream I had a baby but
I left her in a cinder block room
with no doors or windows
on death row
I could walk through concrete walls
when I woke up I was freezing cold
the air in the room like
somebody had told a joke
and everyone just finished
laughing
but no one knew what to say next
my mouth became numb
a pack of doctors and nurses
rushed me to an MRV
people in the hallway starred
don’t you know who I once was?
I touched my mouth
hoping touch could provide—
a group of men lifted me
into a machine
and inexplicably
I started laughing about
the time you took us out
on a homemade sailboat
and Jack got hit in the head with the boom—
saving my body
the new family business
the drugs made me
imagine I was on the Subway
I wound up in front of
my father’s childhood home
where a man was striking match
after match
and letting them burn up
on the sidewalk
a young woman seen from behind
a nurse threw my phone away
and refused to retrieve it
she rolled my body onto its side
forcing me against the guardrail
you’re hurting me
I whispered
but it wasn’t me anymore
on the bedpan
before a ball of fire
destroys everything in sight—
a young woman
wearing a white dress and
lying in a blanketed paddock
the nurse leaves bruises on her arms
resents the body
in a position of repose
the torso
propped up on the arms
all the blood spilling from
the vagina
the shit
the piss
but they are just reminders
that there’s still a pulse
Jesse Arnholz is a queer, disabled American writer, comedian, and artist from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in the Washington Blade, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Windy City Times.
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