Tethered


Lately, it's been all parking garages and busted ticket machines
at Abington Memorial where I go once a week to have my veins
pumped with iron after I told the doctor my hair is falling
from my head like pine needles from a dead tree and I feel
like I’m running in a dream, which isn’t running at all but like
the physical version of a slowed down tape recorder on legs.
I’m lucky to be here for anemia and not something more serious
like the others I pass in the surgery center, slumped in a post
anesthetized haze, mouths puckered around the air as they look
with their lips for a kiss with a bendy straw and moan. Somewhere
inside them, a failed organ cut from the human meat puzzle
that is the body, its neighbors settling like an old house, sighing
good riddance. Who needs a spleen anyway? My time will come soon
enough, I think, my hand absent-mindedly smoothing the new silver
tinsel of my hair, my tongue burying its head inside the gaping hole
in my molar. Across from my iron throne sits my eighty-three
year old mother who’s come to keep me company. You look sad,
she says, fleshy skin tags hanging from her like a dress that keeps
getting marked down to clearance.