small poetry
When he does the shot he has to wash his hands and roll up his sleeves, which is when I get to see his forearms. I can feel numb in my heart and all he has to do is roll up his sleeves and I am disarmed. I don’t know why I love this look, but it might go back to Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. Or else it is just about work, raw, ready.
We do the shots at night at the dining room table where the lighting is soft, almost too soft to measure the liquids. Not the green fluorescent light of a facility.
Lying in bed with a pain behind my heart or too exhausted to get out of the dog bed, the dog bed. When everything feels soft. Even the tines of a fork could feel soft against my cheek. The to-do list backwards on my cheek. In bed, the sky gray of not-spring.
Drawing rotten oranges, those irregular eggs, totally infertile with gorgeous mold.
Feeling somehow brave. Looking for poetry.
The way when before he puts the needle in my thigh he says I love you, that soft light again making shadows of his eyes so they are almost black holes, no color, into which I can disappear.
The drawings on my body, tattoos of forced happiness. That contrast of pain and laughter, the angel smiling like schadenfreude at the needles, pretty bruises discoloring the red ink.
