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Obligatory Health Update

2/24/2025

 
Progress on the Big Long Island Novel™ has been slow, in large part because my habitually unruly body has decided to be particularly unruly over the last few years. I look forward to a three-month convalescence from an upcoming surgery, during which I plan to complete my first draft, come hell or high intracranial pressure. In the meantime, I've begun chronicling my health journey on Instagram here.

Notes for a poem about a solar eclipse.

4/10/2024

 
I can’t remember the last time I threw my head back like this.
The cardboard black-lensed frames are supposed to go over your glasses
but they don’t fit over my gigantic hexagonal frames,
which are gigantic on purpose
because I need their prisms to compensate for the
fourth cranial nerve palsy
that causes me, has always caused me
to see double,
and the bigger the frames,
the more of my field of vision they correct.

There’s already a poem somewhere
about how my first lesson in existentialism came at age 5
when I learned that not everyone
sees a transparent and movable facsimile
of the object on which their eyes focus
when they tilt their head a certain way.
Just me.

Anyway, NASA only says you should put the eclipse glasses
over your regular glasses
and I don’t have an astronomer on speed-dial
to ask whether I have to hold the things over my glasses
for the length of the whole production, or if
it’s safe to wear them underneath.
I don’t really know the mysterious physics of eclipses,
don’t really know how it all works, but
I picture a pipsqueak with a magnifying glass
harnessing the sun to incinerate ants to death,
except the ants are my eyes.

So I figure I’ll just take off my prescription glasses
and wear the things properly.
My eyesight is pretty clear, all things considered,
so it’s okay to take the specs off for about the length of a shower
without causing an eye-strain headache.
I go up to the roof of my office in Long Island City,
take my glasses off
and put on this UV-friendly masquerade mask,
something I won’t have a reason to do for another forty years
(if I make it that long.)

These ersatz glasses are 100,000 times stronger
​than regular sunglasses.
So most of what you see is black.
In the center there is a bright orange crescent
like a fat waxing cracker dipped in melted cheddar. 

It’s a neat trick, 
these celestial bodies suspended in a cosmic dance,
but it doesn’t really warrant the hype.

But wait– 
the double.
Just below and off to the left is a carbon copy,
and as I move it moves with me.
And unlike when I’m looking straight ahead,
when I’m looking up at the sky like this
I can spin and spin and the double never disappears,
only dances,
the real helio remaining centric all the while.
I have gone from disability to superpower in the time it takes
for Clark Kent to transform with the power of accessories.

Here I am, an important adult among important adults
all thronged together with our advanced degrees
everyone stationary, staring at the sky,
and me here twirling round and round
in the kind of twirls only little girls in flowy skirts understand. 
Twirling so that the second eclipse revolves around the real one
which stays put in the middle
like it’s the actual damn sun, which it is.
Twirling, amazed that even for a moment I forgot 
what my own body can do.

The path of totality is just to the west.
Like death it always seems to miss me by a hair.
Somewhere else there are people taking off the glasses
and looking directly at the sun’s luminous corona
framing a black orb.

But I’m fine right where I am.
I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Because what could be more spectacular than your very own
built-in kaleidoscope sitting on either side of your nose?
Here I am,
in love with my lazy eyes.

This can’t be a poem. It’s too obvious. 
Garish, bursting with its own symbolism
like an overripe mango,
like a cartoon rabbit with an oversized mallet,
like the image of god on your toast,
like a total eclipse.

The hairdresser

7/11/2023

 

tilts your head so gently
with the tippy tips of the fingers
he has honed into machines
of exactitude
of precision
of efficiency
that it's almost as if he hasn't tilted your head at all
only suggested it right itself
like that stranger in the street
who chases you down
to bring you the hundred dollar bill you've dropped
or tell you that your dress is bunched up in your panties.
Not to revel in your stupidity,
but to share in your shame.
We've all been there, his fingers seem to say.
His fingers do not know 
that it's clinical.
That it's called ocular torticollis.
That you always tilt your head too much to one side
because when you tilt in the other direction,
you see double.
That you've been overcorrecting this way
for as long as you've been able
to hold your head up on your own.
That your double vision will never be corrected.
That it lives inside and alongside you
so that you sometimes forget
that no one else sees how you see.
No one, not even other eyes
with the same diagnosis
or bloodline
or blood type
or gross annual income
or body mass index.
He doesn't know any of this,
just nudges your head
to right it
so that he can trim your hair evenly
with hands so gentle
​they might have taken the hippocratic oath.

Immaculate

6/4/2023

 

Mine was a virgin birth.

After my sister came,
the doctors sewed my mother up from the outside
then turned her inside out,
like a pillow,
and stuffed her with rosemary and marigolds,
sealing her shut.

When, eight years later,
I crawled out of my mother's mouth,
an immaculate emesis,
it was no wonder I wasn't formed like normal children,
neither fearfully nor wonderfully,
but monstrously,
and smelling of rotting flower petals.

The first man my eyes ever saw was a doctor
a harmer
a healer
an expert
a fixer.
He took me in his arms and clucked like an old lady gossiping after church.
Poor thing, poor creature,
he seemed to say.
Malformed, he scribbled in my file
along with a treatment plan
a roadmap to normal.

But my body had fought its way into existence
like crashing a party.
I swung in on a chandelier and parkoured my way to the dancefloor
before anyone could check the guest list.
And the tribe of women that raised me,
can't you see them?
There they are,
at the bottom of the spiral stairs in quinceañera gowns,
widening their circle to let me in,
wild-eyed and panting,
pretending to know the moves.

They slow themselves down,
hiking up their skirts so I can see their feet at work.
When I stumble, they say nothing,
only continue deliberately, methodically
until I catch up.

But I never catch up, try as I might.

There was a time when I vomited regularly
involuntarily
sometimes heaving so hard
I would pop a blood vessel in my eye
or scratch up my esophagus so badly
I could hardly breathe.

My mother took me to the gastroenterologist
but of course he could find nothing wrong.
A child of vomit
is born to vomit.
And although my mother made me,
I was a thing distinct and inscrutable.

Imagine collecting all of your bodily emissions,
all of your urines and snots and discharges,
inspecting them to arrive at some truth about yourself.
This is the distance between parent and child.

We are all of us refuse of the universe
scrambling around to pick up our scraps
digesting ourselves to life.
​


There are no cats in olam ha-ba

5/27/2023

 

A sabbath afternoon after shul,
walking lazy figure eights
around the poles in the 68th street station
to kill time.

Deviceless,
Untethered in time or space,
floating underground in humid anonymity,
an analog watch on my wrist ticking silently,
I refuse to feel impatience.

The sense of hurry belongs to the week.
​It has no place in this cathedral in time.

The numbers on the digital timetable
keep growing larger instead of smaller,
so I stop looking at it entirely.

When I arrived here,
ten or ten-thousand minutes ago,
I walked to the end of the platform out of habit,
which means now I'm at the farthest point reachable by foot
(unless you're a mole person),
this sip of solitude just one more blessing among the many.

I am thinking about
how I shouldn't be thinking about when the train will decide to arrive--
just as I try not to think about work
or money
or lashon hara--
on this day reserved for holy rest,
​when I notice a tiny movement in the periphery.


I have lunged and stomped on the creature
before I have even registered what it is,
and when I lift my sparkly sneaker
the bug's blood cries out to me from the ground.

The hypocrisy! Keeping holy the sabbath
with occasional pauses in which to commit tiny murders.
If I were forced to account for my time on earth
at this very moment, I would try to explain:
I have three cats, they are terrible influences.
Frankly it's a wonder I didn't pick up the corpse and eat it.

Avinu malkenu,
deal with us justly
annul all harsh decrees concerning us
but if you can only forgive one of us,
please choose me over the cats.

All of this crosses and uncrosses my mind
as the train still has not decided to come,
and once I am no longer on this platform
I will undoubtedly forget.

How easy it is to forget the dead
and think more pleasant thoughts
like how the leftover challah will make great french toast.
And how difficult to remember
​how quickly the sacred turns profane
in human hands,
under human feet.

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