Sedative to dull the words, something like
blizzard
but I forget it and Sevoflurane
so that the words, blizzard or the flakes of the whole, fragment;
enamel, eiderdown, the snow attack
on the hill like blood cells
without blood inside.
It is hard to realize when the ability
to realize is made
into pink matter, relaxed and mute.
On the fifth dawn after the Cold Moon, early December,
I am unmedicated and still cannot
for the life of me
remember how I got inside and outside an eight hour sleep;
where is the porthole? venipuncture?
No purpose for the Band-Aid on the inside of an elbow and
yet it keeps quiet the place where the joints show
I am not a unity.
Dreamless night, by virtue of contrast, shows
how the narrative keeps me mortal:
if the story starts with golden hair
it must end in a glimmer of milkweed
buoyed by air, unattached to the head.
Eight lost hours do not
happen and neither do I; the duration is a nullity:
my skin stays this size, my stomach does not
empty, my full
brain holds undigested comrades, intimacies, I thought to
make into a facet of my older self
only yesterday.
If there is a void where the story
should rest, missing
kidney, word for my mother’s odor,
is there a girl afterwards?
I can’t place a second before I fell
asleep, into the brine, into open hands.
The morning seems unlike itself
without the evening, book reading, wolf hour,
behind it.
Is there a morning to wake
into? Or is stagnant water
the same hour?
If something has been
surgically
removed, then
it is the nucleus of a history I cannot use,
refuse to name.
Sophie Strand is a writer living with a family of cats in the Catskills. She is a lover of mycology, medieval saints, and Middle English.