Poetry by Elly Katz

     Vincent Parsons CC




Accidental Poet 

Ghost in the propofol,
poetry stepped into
the veins, improbable afterlife
frontal in molecular
black holes.
This life is heavy, it’s no
laughing matter. We must live as five-year-olds
blind to heartbeats
skipping rope. For we go too
soon. Earth boils lament, we roll along as if
exempt from ceasing, as if mortality lives across
unreachable boulevards, its dwelling secured, its dolling out of
strokes on reserve for elderly, impossible imposition on
youth. How else can we spoon soup, amplify genetic colonies,
wonder about root systems underfoot?

Stomach down in the OR’s dreamless stupor, a needle
uncontained me
empty, fracturing
my root, flooding consciousness
at the wheel as it tries to remember where that before Eden was,
how daylight poured across the terrain,
how to find the route back
of no return.

If only I could be water, gush into
the void, resume myself
whole, trust my faculties, my body
I can’t know, my endangered
history I mourn to shake off this life
because this soul is too raw for her prospects. But I can’t
tame her, the homeland we share.

Why does the daisy
rot before it ripens?
 
“There’s no map for you. Others with medullary strokes
don’t survive.” Words crawl my skin,
ants from 2022.
 
If there’s no map, I’ll make one, ten thousand
lines built of breath.
Reptile roads, velcro in
memory’s spine, what’s in me of hunger, scent,
taste, hearing, sight?

Strike of the not
happening that continues
happening, my dad hammered iron on linoleum, my mom against
a plastic seat fierce against my carapace tube-fed
radioactive silences in death’s half-life, nuclear arsenal: oxygen, heart-rate, reverse
birth
before the window.

How to language
loss, to grieve ecologically, to asymptote safety
when its no place in the skin?

I circle the periphery of the wound, whose second
anniversary stacks its declarative, threatens to
drown my residues, shattered glass of
the once animate.

Feral echo in darkness, aluminum of the CT table,
“my right leg, my arm. Mom, where are they?”

Her hands on my left side verify fear’s temperature,
scaffold me against the precipice,
her salt’s drain onto my left arm,
volume’s abuse of the left ear I plug,
haunting’s deadweight.

Hemorrhage denatures nociception,
nomenclature dear in lecture halls when what I couldn’t
enunciate lived outside
my inside, how it
rewires the world, funerals of mascara make a
mess of my mom’s face, staple my dad’s mouth, cells negotiate
survival, the unsayable roasts space, dismembers time. I inherit
another body transcribing itself
in my body searching for its stem, synapses
in a one-sided
conversation with
nobody

technology bleeps living into me, what could have
happened, disordered whispers
of what happened  
become me.

Nothing broken fits
back the same way.

This poem, a sacrifice
of sweat and blood.
This poem I’ve avoided, skirted, it’s
truth serum galvanizing my
bruised genes.

My mom’s bent shape runs
into itself in my dad eyes
rimmed with grief’s bloodshot, quiet’s stale
elements, savage noise on
the loose, perverted pathways I can’t
translate into text, nails in
the esophagus.

Logic hides
nowhere.

How to go on after the ICU spit out my
absent body?

I take the poem and the poem
takes me where we shouldn’t go, dive into a wreck
we shouldn’t know without gear, but language
is the portal, the lone shield in the wake.

I go into the ghost, invoke, repeat the disaster until its DNA-deep,
shrill site in my throat to encounter that overdetermined girl
I love, familiar companion who
hemorrhages these margins in her
vulnerable freedom
canceled at 27.

I keep my doors unlocked for her, for
the human who may come, because I am left but she is stranded where I
end, reflecting and refracting in
endless estuaries of my right side.

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement.

 In the wake of tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. 

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