“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
Gravestone of you
grows up,
eyeless orphan
aromatic in memory—
grass smudging into a white fence sweating in summer
melting dandelions into dirt, where worms
taught poetry to my genes,
as I nested cross-legged—
parched skin and tender bones
blurring into Earth, reedy fingertips
devouring the promise of dark for
creatures wriggling in silence
back when the hand-me-down
bites of speech I swallowed came back up garbled
into a talking to
nobody in a language
nobody understands,
rooting an unwitting, seductive
marriage.
The failure was of interest—
risking the tongue to get at something as earnest,
as raw as those worms resourcefully
worming through
loopholes in my fists to travel home, as I
served them
deconstructed words, thinking
far away, blind to the actuality of being.
I pick back up that unwieldy
discourse with
nobody.
This insufficient code of the soil—
aphasia’s shorthand where
language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms, so
“ice pack” emerges as “pillow”, evaporating intention into
other minds inaccessible.
Meaning polished like a coin
between shins and those worms
where ambiguity is everything,
where my memories’ memories are
nowhere
if not in the unbreakable instrument
of my mouth.
In 2022, Elly Katz went to a doctor for a procedure to stabilize her neck before pursuing a doctorate. Upon waking from anesthesia, she began searching for the right half of her body. She survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of tragedy’s switch, she found a foothold in poetry once she recognized the pen in her vocal cords.
