Static Rift
The neurologist sent us home again
a handful of seizures not a high enough currency
to purchase a hospital bed
in this poem you are not dying
yet
and many patients are waitlisted
for a small place to die in
under blinding fluorescents
it is hard to see underneath
all the groans
we are rotting floorboards creaking from the load
Did you hear gods underneath the weight
I mean wait
I mean wait for me don’t leave
I want to say I’m sorry
I want to say I’m sorry
I could not
lift gently
I want to say I’m sorry for spilling you
when I found you
baby sister your stiff brick body
tore holes in my arms
when I found you
your head a puppy’s yelp against wood
How can a static skull still claim a life?
I witness the empty
picture in your pupils
it hurts only to see
myself in them
did you feel a god when your body began to move without consent
did his hands hurt
did they incinerate
your chest your arm
your hand
your head
moves away
heaves against the hell behind your frontal lobe
absence seizure
the doctors keep saying I believe in both
you are an absence
your body seizing like gold
daffodils under torrential spring showers
two bluebird eyes bulging portals an ether I slip into
The absence of meaning creates a rift in time
which must be the meaning of this split of earth we now breathe in.
tell me you are here in this rift with me
though your eyes play vacant
clear lakes leading to the dark
I
pitch
against
my little daffodil
lover of wild flowers
because you hate uniformity
I won’t tell you that your stem
is torn from a brain’s beating current
the rips the blood the bruise from being
stuck by this bee needle
ER nurses stick with multiple stings do you feel them
your skin does
collects the needles’ bite
bluish plum sap soaking the skin
a body turns on you
not towards.
are you still
calling it yours
I still hold it stammer stutter
baby sister utter my friend
in this limbo in this in between phase the brain mimics
friend the postictal phase
the phase in between your frontal lobe’s misfiring
the phase after a seizure in which breath returns
the phase in which I see the ghost of normalcy
I hear her voice but it sounds like
a silhouette of my sister stuck in her bed
webs of screams stick to me
echoing stop stop stop in the night
I am there with her
beside her
not knowing if I should take her back to the hospital
not knowing if this is enough rest between seizures
not knowing if she could die from the electric jolts playing with infinity
not knowing if I should wait for her vitals to drop like the doctor said
because you are still not sick enough for that coveted hospital bed
For the first time in 10 years I pray
but my words cling like moths to a temporary light
They die before the sun even rises
and I am afraid
you are going to die because the pause is so brief
the relief in this brevity is like breathing in smoke
a poison I hop into and
you look
at me unflinchingly with a prayer’s plea
for an end
even if it means…
I want to understand this
I want to understand this
I want to make sense of this
how a body can turn on you
how I once saw your limp legs dance
how just last week I heard your vocals in perfect pitch sing House of the Rising Sun
how I no longer see the sun rising
after days of adrenaline
robbing sleep
I forget sunlight
I forget where it lives
I forget a weary face could still feel
warmth
The days
rifts
seaming together
an achingly perfected stitch of torment empty of answers
of a cause
of a definition
for my seizing sister wrenching
we move onwards though
in an absent sense of days
living in the rift of this
the earth calls out to me
stranger
standing in an in between
I let myself go there
the minutes mold only seizures
then the postictal breath which I latch onto
sister hold my eyes
if you stay here with me I will take you
back to the creek we splashed against scavenging
for gold but discovering only toads which were just as
valuable to our dimpled grasp we held them
like precious moments hoping to somehow keep a thing
that moves away from our fairy fingers
and I hope to keep you
though the days dwell in a stasis
and you move into the arms of status epilepticus
I cannot wake you this time even though your eyes are open
looking into them I search for a creek babbling in all that
empty blue
you carry the weight of it without blinking
all I see are eyes filled with vacancies
the hospital bed now ready
to nest my sister my chest still grips
doctor now ready for the
seamless moments in her estranged body
begging for an absence
to this boundless seize of time
Annalee Fairley is a poet currently based in Roanoke, VA. Over her writing career, her poetry has been published in Ink&Nebula, Apricity Magazine, and The Black Fork Review. She has been the recipient of the Betty Killebrew Literary Award and the Neill James Creative Writing Scholarship. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry on a Gager Fellowship at Hollins University.
