Procedures
I had a tooth once that erupted in the roof of my mouth.They rigged it with a wire and it was night when I wokein the office. A nurse waited. When she switched off the lights,I switched off. I wasn't a kid anymore. I rode the elevator,hailed a cab, fingered the gauze and snow fell,that swirling acceleration down Lake Shore Driveto Mom. Our house was dark, I remember, the energy crisis.Mom in the kitchen, high heels clicking to the stovethat caught the blue and I swam, a melting glacierof painkillers. Sweet tea for the gritty tooth that pounded.I remember Mom left the room, heels clicking, and the darkhealed after her like a skin of water. Our first home is water.
Today I wake in a hall of a hundred cots in perfect rows.My neighbor stares at me like a fish,everyone in gray smocks after the abortion.They don't tell you this part.I brought myself here and I need to get my things.They don't tell you but your own blunted limbsknow cold, no one here to help.The anesthesiologist laughed, I remember, the entangled cords,and beeps and I carried laughter's gas into the darkof a light switched off. In the cab down Park, tulips nod red-orange.This is the past catching me, Mom's bright, blurred dress,her splotches of big flowers on the hookbehind the bathroom door–her Crate & Barrel,five pregnancies, six years straight–too close, too fast. How can I dissolve?Home, I bring sweet tea to the bath,I bring the whole trickling house of me. [End Page 199]
Gabrielle Frahm-Claffey's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Harvard Review Online, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, New American Writing, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
