Member Poem

You like the way the surgeon performs the Russian dances of her childhood on the low metal slab. Mercantile, tender. Like she’s buying the autobahn, the TransCanada, the Beemster ring as far as Moosejaw—failing to populate these with the requisite number of Starbucks.

You are aware there are other anatomies, other narratives—languages like refracting windows, self-referential in their limitations, like nuns burying small items in the framework of convents.

Lists of things you meant to pack but left behind. Half-read copies of Der Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv lying in unauthorized transaction blown out, face down, showing their back matter. Familiarity. Pain management. Unwaged labour. Hypervigilance. EMDR.

Doors close around your metonymy. Sensory deprivation, precarity, mesh underwear, droppers, tubes, tungsten fibers, underwater movement. Computers on wheels encased in further aluminum frames like thought errors, like census surveys, like performative speech acts, like boxes full of Steyr AUGs. Quantities of cotton held between pincers like foxtails on the wide Alberta plain.

There are other instruments but they are for manufacture. It is the way: words belong to bodies or to nothing at all—it is correct. Incarnate.
 
*first published in Train Journal, Issue 5