“Your heart is photogenic, but it’s shy,” the nurse
announces, sliding her jellied wand
over my left breast and under, along the ribs
as the bright green line of my life
scoots and blips and scoots in reassuring intervals
on the TV monitor affixed to the wall.
“I’m truly posthumous,” my favorite enfant
terrible declared, “and no extra charge,”
but I packed up an entire apartment like practicing
for death. From an old passport, my younger self
stares at me: full-cheeked, with anxious eyes,
she wonders at the crepe-paper crinkle above my upper lip,
my cheekbones carved by shadow, my wisping hair.
And I stare back: there’s nothing I can tell her,
no warning or advice she’d hear. Em dashes
scar my diaries. The doctor’s screen
shivers in the blizzard static of an ancient black-
and-white TV where snow, once started, falls and falls.
This is drawn from “Hindsight.”
