At an Artist’s Residency
my shoulder came out of its socket—limp, feebly throbbing. It took an hour to go back into place, on the rubber floor of the gym at a near-dead women’s college, and all the equestrian girls hovered over me and said you’re getting pale sir, before moving on. The German sculptor asked if she could finish her leg routine, then said something about American healthcare that I agreed with in a large sense, but thought was cruel to say at that specific moment, to me specifically, the person in pain.
A playwright said she was a healer, nondenominational and not all the time, but worth a shot. She stood behind me, hands an inch from my body — is it warm yet? Later, she read a monologue about almost dying, the image of a friend at her bedside every time her eyes fluttered open, bleeding like a watercolor, and all of us were crying by the end. I was thinking I’ll never be loved like that, which isn’t true, which made me sadder for being so lucky, and for having to lie to myself to feel.
Everyone’s working title has wound in it,
like body but with higher stakes.
A novelist started calling me son. She wasn’t a healer but she was a seer, only sometimes, usually first thing in the morning. One morning, she grabbed me by the shoulder and didn’t notice me wince. She said, I’m a little worried about you. I asked what she saw and she said it wasn’t as literal as all that, seeing really means feeling.
A bunch of us went to the lake, brown green milk. We couldn’t see our legs. A painter shouted: It’s amniotic! The playwright said she could remember the womb and the sound of her cells multiplying, like popcorn. This was the kind of place where nobody called bullshit on anything. I wondered, not for the first time, what it would feel like to drown, but for the first time there was very little curiosity, almost only fear.
You were the size of a pomegranate on an app.
I was too far from home.
Underwater, everything sounds like a heartbeat.
On the old boathouse by the dock, there were names scrawled in wood.
I wrote yours under the people you’d never know,
as the horses whinnied fear far off, and the lake shuddered
before a storm.