Tonight, the Moon

Prologue

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

from ‘Lady Lazarus’, by Sylvia Plath

Content

Wake up.

Wake up.

Open your eyes.

Breath. It hurts, I know.

Something is wrong. This is wrong. The light is wrong. The room is wrong.

Look around.

White.

beep. beep. beep.

The heartbeat of heartless machines. Sleeping stirring murmuring. Sleepers. Movement outside, along the hallway.

(When I woke up I felt so foggy, I could barely see. I think. I don’t know. This part is hard to remember. I know that my arms were covered in blood. I know that they stung. My stomach hurt so much. My little sister came into my room, she was eleven years old. I held up the bottle and the razor blade, I didn’t say a word. I think I showed her my arm. I think. I don’t know. There was a bowl next to my bed. I didn’t remember putting it there. It was full of something thick, doughy, acrid. Vomit. I don’t remember the next part. I don’t remember getting there, I don’t remember the drive to the hospital. They stuck me with needles. My throat hurt, my stomach hurt, my muscles hurt, my liver hurt. The machines made me throw up for a day, for twenty-four hours. I remember that. I remember the vomit. I remember that, I think.)

You were never supposed to wake up.

You never should have opened your eyes.

The room is white.

The room is moaning.

Don’t move.

Don’t move.

Don’t move.

The dogs wait. The dogs pace. You can hear them in the hallway. The dogs grin.

You were never supposed to wake up.

(For a long time afterwards, I thought I was in hell. I’m not delusional, I’m not crazy, but I thought I was in hell. I thought I was being punished, and this was my punishment: three AM in a hospital bed, and the sound of the dogs in the hall. I thought that I would be there forever, and I very nearly was. Once you’ve experienced the hospital at three o’clock in the morning, you will never be the same. Once you’ve experienced the sounds of a hospital room in the darkness, it’s so easy to believe in hell. I thought I was in hell, for years afterwards. No one knows this.)

Close your eyes.

Sleep.

It’s not morning, not yet.

Epilogue (1995)

Sheet

The moon will be full of me tonight.
She will be bloated and round.
I will be flat.
A white sheet with black cut-outs for eyes.
They will fold me into a smooth square.
No wrinkles, no imperfections –
I will be plentiful no longer.

Tonight

Tangled in the light of the moon last night,
I tried.
I rolled ten small death-caps in my palm,
and ten more, and many after that.
Water evaporated, the chalk coating my throat.
Drip, drip, slide.
Empty thoughts drip into a dead nerve.

Hot and cold and spinning and red red everywhere

White

White, hands, a room of twisting room.
I am wretched, I am inside out,
Pulled and contorted in a room of mirrors.
But I am not silver. I am blue like a bruise,
I am collapsing.
In the empty white room I shake, I am awake.
The spark burns me. Black and pitted,
floating on a vein-wave, my arm is drunk.

Museum

This room is a museum.
We are tended to, carefully,
we are exhibits.
You can look, we say, but never ever touch.
We are vulgar mummies, cracked and peeling,
heart-empty.

The fish-eyed doctors swimming through
an antiseptic sea.
Don’t touch, we say. Please stay away.

Make-Believe

A new room, a new floor.
Here the faces are stone. The doctors are
scared. As they should be
Nurses hand out medicine,
delicious candy.
Voices, voices, shrill as the beak of a bird.
We all echo.

Twirling through the white noise of the cathedral,
the sounds of the past and memories white and vivid
chill me, to the white core of my bones.

I swerve like a frown though the thick
and I see at the foggy shore
myself, the ghost.

Frankenstein, holding the bloody scissors and
a brand-new head, is ready.

The End