Today, the Body Refuses Metaphor
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
Today, the body refuses metaphor.
(Nothing sings. Nothing opens like a flower.)
Lightning is just /lightning/
blunt /electric/ crawling from the left leg
into the skull /like a deadline./
They hand me the chart:
Rate your pain from 1 to 10.
I circle a number. Not because it’s true,
but because it’s lonely (to be blank.)
What is aching supposed to do?
The verbs on the list blur together
/radiates/ pulses/ burns/ throbs/
as if pain is a (love) poem.
As if I should know when to use
/tender/ over /sharp/
how to tell a nurse (I’m dissolving.)
What I mean to say is:
I am running out of leg.
The nerves are compressing
(like crushed film reels)
and the story of movement
is being erased /frame by frame./
What I mean is:
walking becomes a theory.
I do not know how to describe this
except to say/I limp now/
And soon (maybe) not even that.
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Self-Portrait as Warning Label
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
The tremor isn’t psychosomatic.
It blooms from a storm surge in soft tissue
rides the axon /like a faulty wire/
I tell them: it’s chronic (idiopathic)
I don’t tell them about the nights
(I mistook it for possession.)
My body hums at 60 Hz
an artifact (they can’t filter out.)
I flinch before touch /like a defibrillator/
charged, blinking, unpredictable.
My brain is a waiting room
without a triage nurse.
Language /stutters/ on my tongue
a firefly trapped
(between cortex and jaw.)
Words just /pool/
at the exit wound
of my mouth.
So, feel free to ask me (anything.)
I will hand you /silence/
wrapped in billing codes
and interest rates.
On the intake form, I wrote:
“No known allergies.”
But I am /reactive/
to fluorescent lighting
to platitudes.
I begin to swell when
medical professionals say “just breathe”
and dish out diagnoses of /lose weight/ after
five-minute or less conversations.
There is a name for this
in some manual (I wasn’t given.)
Something Latin for
“woman who walks /like a question mark/
& sleeps like an autopsy report.”
When I bleed, it is quietly.
When I hurt
it sounds /like being polite./
I once told a nurse
the pain was a six.
She said:
“You’re very composed for a six.”
She didn’t see the part of me
that left the room already.
That’s the trick.
I disappear so well
(I always forget to come back.)
So if you must take this body,
read the contraindications first.
Side effects include / dissociation
/delayed grief/
and a history of noncompliance
with staying alive.
I filed the discharge papers.
What remains is side effect (not self.)
This body is out of warranty.
The manufacturer assumes no liability for continued use.
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The Body is a Poor Historian Haibun
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
The body is a poor historian / (It remembers the flare, the sear, the shudder, but not the date.) A nerve burns for a moment/ or for an hour/ or for a season (that refuses to name itself). I wake with a tongue of flame/ at my hip. (Did it start yesterday?/ Last June?/ When I learned to run, or when I learned to fall?) How am I to list this down/ How can the language (that fits inside a throat) capture a sensation that knives its way/ through bone? I try anyway: tongue scratching paper/ dragging sound against silence/ tearing syllables into ash.
Scar blooming sideways/
rain pools in the hollow bones/
(forgetting the drought).
The elbow twitches/ the shoulder folds in on itself (like crumpled paper). Somewhere deep inside/ a synapse snaps/ a flare in a forgotten corridor/ and a new wound tattoos itself over the old. There is no calendar/ for the electric ache. No journal can hold/ the exactitude of pain. Each word I offer feels wrong/ slick/ foreign. Pain refuses translation/ (It thrashes against description like a moth against a closed window.)
Lightning stitches me/
a tapestry of lost sparks/
woven through the ribs.
Every sensation/ a palimpsest. Yesterday’s scream half-erased/ under today’s whisper of ache. Tomorrow’s silence (already fraying at the edges). Our only record: a muscle flinching at an invisible strike/ a nerve humming a note no one taught it.
Ash sifts through my skin/
phantom embers of a war/
(no body remembers).
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For Office Use Only
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
The nurse asks if I’ve had trauma.
I say yes
& she checks the box
like it’s solved something.
(box: checked / not body.)
I try not to apologize
for flinching
/ for crying
/ for calling it what it is:
a system made of needles and stairs / (I cannot climb.)
The clipboard knows more about me
than my lovers
& still
no one touches me
without gloves.
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About the Author
Madeleine Simmons is a disabled poet and English lecturer. She is a poetry editor for Inlandia Institute: A Literary Journey. She currently resides with her cats in her home-turned-sanctuary in Riverside, California.