Anna Gasaway
After the Stroke
My prefrontal lobe tries to pull itself
back together, but I, an invincible
21-year old, think death cannot
harm me. What is left
of my healthy neurons shoot out
sprouts of connection astrocytes to repair
the damage incurred by the clot
cutting off oxygen to my translator.
Miraculous, the way the world
looks to me now
a kind of burning
a kind of
*
If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem,
and the way my clogs clacked
on your stone walkways, or how
the walls of the Old City felt womb-like,
or how the light strikes differently,
older and more golden. On a veranda
in Jerusalem overlooking where Palestinians
threw rocks and Israelis fired
their guns, I ate tart tangerines
with yogurt and granola and milk
out of a bag. I sipped mint tea and ate
warm lavash bread with lebneh cheese
and zaatar spice that the Druze goatherders
brought up from the hills of Haifa. I wanted
to try everything—to taste and see,
oh, taste and see, that it is good.
The Politics of Hunger
Mira, my mother-in-law says to her
boy, at the two ounces pumped after
feeding my infant son. Que flaquito,
she whispers, She’s starving my little
one. I am bleary tired—and abuela wants
to feed him the bottle. My husband thought
his mother carried him around skin-
to-skin while she walked through Balboa
Park. No, I was through with that after your
sister bit me. Mijo, I put you in a drawer to sleep.
My son looks at me accusingly. What
can I offer him but my breast? He roots,
shudders and passes out, inebriated,
with a trail of milk drool across his face.
Peristalsis
And weren’t we so relieved
when our baby passed his first
meconium, charting it, now greenish
and finally, mustard-yellow with white
seeds of a breastfed baby and one
of the side-effects of pregnancy
is constipation and the first indication
that something was wrong was diarrhea.
Everything slows down for new life.
The olfactory bulb, the sense
of smell, is something that if not used
from birth, is lost, like sight, like movement.
I was the child with the constant cold,
with little Kleenex bunnies in all of my coats.
I can’t smell and at women’s shelter,
three-year-old Matty used
poop as a crayon to mark the little toilet
area for the children. Surprising how
quickly he smeared his feces everywhere
on that gray tile and it provided a sense
of ownership and control, expressed feelings
of rage, powerlessness; None of this I knew
I just slapped some gloves on him and me
and we scrubbed it down together. He never
did that again, Something about my lack of negative
emotion, the refusal to disgust, the encouragement,
together-time, the peristalsis, microvilli doing
their best to wave the bolus on.
Anna Abraham Gasaway sometimes does not know how to live with her tired and cranky disabled body. She is a neurodivergent, half-Jewish poet who has had a stroke and stillbirth. She also delivered a live baby fifteen years ago. She lives in San Diego with her husband, son and rescue boxer-mastiff.