It’s Not a War
What’s inside me? Surgery clips, a stent trail,
stones, plastic. All the people inside me are
clamoring to get out, sliding little doors open
in my belly, lurching onto the bed, red dressed,
blue uniformed, drums throbbing, trumpets lifting
and blaring. That’s why I don’t think of illness
as war: the anarchic little army on my side
get their steps mixed up and then forget to salute.
When I was a child, everybody had a doll
with a big crocheted skirt to hide a roll of toilet paper.
Yes, the toilet paper doll. That’s how I learned not to
love my belongings. Who needs a clock striking
and striking, new doeskin gloves. sad little parodies
of dress-up clothes? That blood in my urine. I like
to think it’s just an infection, something slipped into
my body. Decades ago the tip of a Foley catheter bounced
in my bladder for three years. A nurse didn’t notice it
when she smoothly pulled out the catheter. It was bad luck,
not some lost battle. I got the crumbs that slid off a table.
I got the duck bone, white in my broth. The forecast is
healing. I admit that’s only a theory, a grasping at straws.
But there’s no need to wash my hands of hope. I read
about a tornado, fires in New Mexico, smoke moving east.
l get it. I’ll breathe till I stop that breathing, turn to what’s
blooming, put purple blossoms into my hands. The dirt
smells like rain and pine fronds. Just beyond there’s a dune
and the salt-sand. Wind keeps shaping it. Spindrift froths up.
Barbara Daniels
Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Among her other books are Rose Fever: Poems and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, and elsewhere. She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
