Positive

1. READING THE RESULTS

I don’t move,

but the inside corner

of my right eye turns glassy,

then shatters,

hands focus more sharply.

I don’t move,

but the pigeon shudders

on the sill.

The door opens to a maze

of wallpaper, family photos—

their bliss-frieze burns

the last unaffected corner of my sight,

like molten Karo.

My husband’s mouth collapses,

and the air about his shoulders

has crystallized.

We don’t say a word,

all the noise is around us,

the letter, half-folded, on the desk,

an albatross, a dove.

2. POSITIVE

Because in those days there were no words

for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept

with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate

at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning:

enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools

of butter, little sides of sautéed onions, paper cups of pure

sour cream, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser,

but now when the call comes I’m sitting in the kitchen

with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump

on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron

sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table,

milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word

heroin makes me feel the lovely way

a body can go slack from inside out.

3. A SINGLE DROP

I’d never paid much mind

to my implements, but now

I paint “Fire Engine Red”

on the handle of my razor, a single drop

on my nail clippers, one long

stroke on my lethal toothbrush

to cordon off my blood,

I tend and sop each splash or seep,

soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets—

every bleeding gum, torn hangnail,

paper cut, scrape, gully of cracked lip

another hazard, each

infectious throb now

forever watched as I patrol

my body’s raging arroyo

in the family bathroom,

to keep my children

safe from me.

4. PAPER GOWNS

X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing

those delicate petals (gaping,

cold through the sleeves).

He asks me to extend my palms:

the motion is of pushing away.

Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft

tup, tup, tup, along my spine,

as if checking a cantaloupe.

There is a piece of gum

beneath the windowsill,

green imprint of a thumb.

We’re talking percentages, genotypes,

we’re talking bundled pharmaceuticals.

Studies, it seems, are inconclusive.

I try to look at the big picture:

a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash,

neither in, nor out. On the insurance card,

raised numbers, black ink worn away.

There's a girl on the street with her head back,

the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

Source: Adonis Garage (The University of Nebraska Press, 2005)