BECAUSE IT’S OCTOBER
and I’m watching ambulance lights bathe a motel
and not thinking about the loose glitter my body is,
because everything inside me isn’t rattling like a change purse,
not splitting into smaller versions of itself, small enough
to be threaded through the eye of a needle,
I think my brain is done swallowing itself
the way the ocean swallows itself, I think I’m done
being car parts in a shed,
because I’m watching a bee fuck a rosebush
and not seeing switchblades, not counting
the number of times I’ve worn anxiety like a nosebleed
or thought my fingers didn’t belong to me, and because I’m wearing new shoes
and have painted my toenails the red of balloons, not blood transfusions,
I’m looking at a poplar tree and understanding why owls
might couple there, I’m feeling like a real person
with real skin, real hair, a real heart that isn’t packed in a cooler,
real lungs tied together, not hostages
but two people in a bathtub,
and the spider above my head tunes its web like an electric guitar,
reeling in the fly that expected today to go very differently,
and I’m not seeing that as a metaphor for my love life,
not feeling like plaque in an artery,
a ransacked castle with its drawbridge up,
I’m not losing my name in someone else’s cigarette
or looking into eyes and seeing zeroes,
so I think I’m ready to spit out the needle-nose pliers
in my mouth, I think I’m done being a dimmer switch,
because it’s October, and I’m touching your face,
which feels like a face.
Ruth Madievsky‘s first poetry collection, “Emergency Brake,” was named Tavern Books’ 2015-2016 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection and is forthcoming in January 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Tin House Scholar in Poetry. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral student at USC’s School of Pharmacy.