New Wave: Post Op

By MARIA TERRONE

Such an adrenaline rush to find
myself alive
this seventh time, injected
with glee on the stretcher,
making my usual “I’m o.k.” calls,

and thinking I’d heard the surgeons’ banter
as I struggled to swim back up
to the light and cold,
their talk about a French film
recently revived,

but I couldn’t know for sure
because I was a body freeze-framed,
halted in black and white
on the grainy sand
of a beach like Antoine Doinel
trying to flee those 400 blows.

 

[Purchase Issue 14 here.]

 

Maria Terrone’s poetry collections are Eye to Eye; A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize, Ashland Poetry Press); The Bodies We Were Loaned; and a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. Her work has appeared in magazines including POETRY and Ploughshares and in more than twenty-five anthologies. 

New Wave: Post Op

Related Posts

"kochanie, today i bought bread" Book Cover

September 2023 Poetry Feature: Uljana Wolf

ULJANA WOLF
legnica your direction is uttered: night halfnight / legnica your sirens rise in the gate-keeper's lodge / and keep the flag on all clear: /            yellow yellow the direction’s right / a crooked wave the gate the cross / legnica in singsong of tracks land trickles away / legnica your sky

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

MIGUEL M. MORALES
Days into the promise of a new year, resolutions plentiful, blossoming, / seven farmworkers were shot and killed harvesting mushrooms in Half Moon Bay. / Those of us who sprouted from families, whose hands and backs worked the land, / waited for news of our farmworker siblings.

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort, / then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds, / gulls and grackles built their nests. / Mourning doves call from the eaves / of the old factory, closed during the Depression.