Max Gillette
Alveoli
For my father
When I was a child, my father spoke
the stainless language of machines. He would
come home from work and anoint my face
with oil-stained hands. Never fixed
for long, he soon learned a new trade,
became a respiratory therapist. He turned
inwards to the pumps and pressures
of the body’s working. And he was good at it, his
steady mechanic’s hands in the dark thoracic chasm
keeping breathing unbroken. Now, my father is
the only one in this hospital room. I do not know why
the nurses let him stay. He links his hands
across my chest as they snip into my skin. You have to breathe, he says.
So I do.
Under his careful fingers, the heavy red slick machinery shudders on.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Perfection can be measured against
any open mouth. All things must fall
in or outside that holy O—you
either kiss him or you don’t, and
Earth, in all her experience, still
tilts and stutters as she reels us around.
The circle before you now is hulking
plastic—a secret magnet sunk
in helium—so huge its breath swirls
the room into chaos. Nurses scurry across
the sterile floor, bracing for an attempt
to hold you in its center.
You’re tucked into bed at the mouth
of the machine, and it crashes to life
around you like the first atomic fusions.
Under a synthetic membrane, magnets whirl
fast as solar winds. Hydrogen inside you twists
in time with the machination—molecular
dancers backlit by intravenous dye.
Your body heaves in the middle
of the machine—clenched in its white teeth.
Max Gillette is an English major at Central Michigan University, where they work as an editor for two student-focused publications. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Cutbow Quarterly, JAKE, Defunkt Magazine, the voidspace, Moss Puppy Magazine, and other journals. You can find Max on Twitter @quartzpoet.