Temporary Apartment
At times the body hides its evidence, missed synapse, not sickness but a gap or a lack, what is taken for granted. No amount, no way of compensation. How my grandfather lived decades with shrapnel from the war in his brain, the brain in its broken state warring, firing into the void. Still, I don’t trust the doctor’s robust machinery. How can this beacon of my body guiding a body out of the ancient sea be turned back into sea? No heartbeat under my heart asking, “Who will you be?”—when the night wakes us with proof on the sheets, when the husk of the bathtub catches me as my legs surrender, and I lie there in the dark in our sublet apartment wondering what’s in the rooms closed off to us.