I think of your hand on my stomach And the water in my lungs.
You sit with me in Emergency, and just listen to me talk.
Something about my students, about inevitability— Something I wanted to say but didn’t about the earthquake In the Indian Ocean and the tectonic plates that not only Resist but emerge stronger after friction.
You say you have nothing wrong, no chaos—
Just me dragging you through moving cars
And making you read between my
Frowns and “brown-out” cacophony.
But I think you are that ocean I think you are that elastic, that opposite Of fragile thing.
I think it goes wrong, I think it all sometimes Goes wrong—that is inevitability.
You just don’t realize because
Stronger
Doesn’t cover
Your rebirth from friction.
Phantom Pains
Same as me, you had your gallbladder taken out When you were 23.
The laparoscopic scars dot our stomachs Like stars on blurry eyes.
You notice this again, for the second
Time. Memory of the first
You lost and incrementally find, My scars on your blurry eyes.
In the morning, when you didn’t remember,
I felt myself ripping, stretching
Skin away from you. I can’t spend another day being seen Blurry. I am the red car lights on your wet windshield.
We both feel pain in the place our organ was taken.
I don’t think there are answers; we Both have no answers why, but even as pain
Blurs, it sticks thick like tar.
You see yours in the one centimeter lines, and remember.
I’m still mad at you for his forgetting.
Removed him through four points in my abdomen, but It’s his phantom’s pain my blurry eyes blame you for.
valley summer sun standing the crack of the sliding glass, the end of supervision. the hush, the push out the door, closed behind us. degrees climbing vines and trees. the hours passed and she still stands on the opposite side of the glass. we’re sweating, red, but pale, hungry, banging on the glass. she doesn’t let us in but shows teeth,
straight genes, not braces, bears, and disappears. summer soul
standing she leaves us outside in the sun baking, no food until we braid grass cots and go to sleep in her
soil
Piper Pugh is a poet and educator living in Los Angeles, CA.
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