Liz Whiteacre

WITNESS

I’m obsessed with your fear, which arrives
with injury that may be terminal.

It’s surgeon, decides where its first incision
should go. Your body, every sense in your limbs,

is numb; your cells freeze with disbelief;
your life depends on one drive.

Saturated by impatient motorists, the night slows
to the blue beat of ambulant light that flashes

to announce emergency in the van. Not without beauty
is this light, waving in windshields.

But you aren’t witness: only the EMTs see
cars part or not part on the packed streets,

and this fear seeks conclusion in every rush
of your blood. Everyone kisses their loved ones

tonight before bed. This fear, your fear, with its fevered,
slow-motion perspiration, seeks at your accident a witness,

waits your emergency’s outcome, life or death, waits
to see if drivers slow or don’t slow, to let your fear pass,

and judges everyone, clinically, as if reaper because,
ultimately, this fear doesn’t care if you live or die.

* * *

TENS UNIT

Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation
in a little black plastic box, four coated copper
wires, four white discs, four squirts of green goo,
nine volts of electricity attached to my skin.

Oh granddaughter of the Electreat, remember
Ben Franklin, sweet pioneer of neuropathic pain
prevention? Now, in only ten short minutes,
I learn I must never place the pads on my eyes,
throat, open wounds, numb skin, temples or genitalia.

I imagine bespeckeled Mr. Franklin listing the same
orders and chuckle?genitalia. Something silly
in the midst of pain counsel is welcome: I will electrocute
my pains with this small battery, activating serotonin
receptors in my spine’s base, prompting pain
to banish pain, at least while the battery lasts.

Liz Whiteacre is an Associate Professor of English at College of DuPage. She was awarded the Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for emerging poets from Indiana University in 2008. Her work has appeared in The Bloomington Bugle, Etchings and The Prairie Light Review.