The Human Touch 2013 - University of Colorado Denver

You Live On Me, Within Me
Trista Ross
When you hand me my medication, you are wearing purple nail polish, and your hair
is a bright
Marilyn Monroe blonde, or someone
I used to dream about when I was young and had all my bones. My skin shrivels
when I touch your arm, but you never shy away. My hand feels like the hair of a
drowned girl,
next to yours,
and you cackle like the hens in Mother’s backyard.
This is what my cells do.
They laugh. They grow. They change.
You can’t see them behind the counter.
I can’t feel them, behind my skin.
They eat marrow mixed with brain matter.
They tap dance to old country ballads that whine and grate.
I’m one of your regulars, you tell me,
but believe me,
I know.
I dream about your long legs I can’t see,
your blue eyes lined with so much black and purple
you look like you’ve been bruised.
You pretend not to stare at the hairs poking from my cheek mole,
never look at the stain on the thigh of my brown corduroys,
never question my habits,
how my seventy-two hour Fentanyl patch became thirty-six hours became eight
oxycodone tablets a day mixed with Advil and Tylenol and nausea pills,
and don’t forget the suppositories.
I was ashamed to ask for directions.
You wouldn’t tell me.
I know.
You have to call the man in the white coat,
and he looks down from his perch to answer my questions,
hawk’s eyes staring at the threads on my hands.
You never question me.
You ring me up, smile,
tease when I don’t know how to use the credit card machine.
I love the way your blue smock makes the veins on your neck stick out,
and the red crept up so beautifully the day I brought you fl owers.
I had Lucille bake you cookies.
She didn’t ask for whom. She never does.
This is the way my cells grow.
Like dandelions, they whiten as they age.
They transform into ramshackle igloos,
burst open into a pleasure like teenage boys thinking of Doris Day, in dreams.
I sit still, marvel
at how my skin pulls like the taffy I used to gnaw on when I was younger and could
swallow the world.
I’m up to three patches a day.
Also citalopram and lorazepam, to smother the lingering taste of wet chicken skin,
to deafen the steps that sound like cartilage, crunching.
I send Lucille to see you,
but she tells me nothing about how
your eyes look like the bleeding edges of pansies,
or how your acne comes and goes, how you cover the bumps on your cheeks with
powder,
but I can see the fl ecks, and everyone else can, too.
Did I ever tell you the inside of my esophagus looks like Hiroshima,
or the bottom of a frying pan Lucille’s
too lazy or too tired or too bored to clean?
This is what my cells do.
They grow. They change. They turn my stomach
over onto itself, so I taste the gruel of my intestines I was never meant to see.
How long will the pressed outline of myself stay on this chair?
How long will the chair will stay in this room?
The forks and spoons will sit in the drawer,
long after the taste of my lips has left them.
The things you live on will outlive you, always.
In my fever, my brain melts out my nose.
I see nurses dressed as angels, a chrome room,
singing cards, your face like
thistles dipped in snow.
Your voice comes to me in a dream,
and I sing to you about my bones,
how they’ve become too soft to hold •
PG 94
PG 95