“ Sometimes
I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney.
Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures:
kishkes. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls
before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain,
I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff,
almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. Yesterday I saw
a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t
know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of
forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times
I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it
still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made
me has ceased to exist: my knees. To everything a season, to
every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing
for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid.
Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it
all.
”