ISSUE ELEVEN | FALL 2018
Where Do We Go From Here?
after Grey’s Anatomy S11E09
I need a mechanism to protect the body from harm: to face something or to run away, even after I promised you no running. Call it shock, caretaker, whatever you're seeking to stabilize, whatever you need.
I tell my bodyworker that I've had a rough few days: spiraling pain, insomnia, rare clusters of panic attacks. She says she wants to release the nerve blooms, the anastomoses: “a connection or opening between two things (especially cavities or passages) that are normally diverging or branching, such as between blood vessels, leaf veins, or streams” (Wikipedia).
This is all of me: a confluence of nerve endings rippling scar tissue, even as I take my time, I knit together pain and grit and worry about everything, but you are never prepared when it comes. Whatever it is, whatever we can do doesn't make it any harder than it already is. It is already hard.
In this episode, Meredith intuits a tumor on a woman’s pancreas, which secretes insulin and creates wild fluctuations in blood glucose levels, leading to extreme mood swings, impulsivity, bouts of rage and profound anxiety, cognitive deficits, etc. Insulanoma!, she shouts in the operating room. She knew it; she knew it was there, a solution to something scary and hard. Not having control is the worst thing, not having someone when you need someone, not being sick.
I need my animal self to become a bright wind.
The Surge, or Remember the Time
after Grey’s Anatomy S09E02
patience is canon—something to spit out,
that I may be re-shaped
without heaving muscle, the clamps
anchoring my scapula, your lighthouse
done ignoble; instead miraculous
hands, on fire;
catch me in a mood and discover
how I can never keep my mouth shut,
how fisted I grow when pressed—
I don’t remember closing the self off
like I have, but again I am
tremulous and unforgiven.
Ask again for me to unclench—
I meant it—I’ll do anything you want,
just drag me in, wind against me
like a fist of thread, of deep
secrets, of quiet evenings under window,
soothe, my hands no longer
in need of putting out
Jesse Rice-Evans is a queer writer from North Carolina. Read her work in The Wanderer, Bad Pony, Dream Pop Press, and others. Her first full-length, The Uninhabitable, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019. She teaches and studies writing in New York.
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