i really like this.

[from Hospital Drive: A Journal of Words and Images at the University of Virginia School of Medicine]

Birthday Eight

I find her when I fall, a bike accident one week

Before my eighth birthday. The sun is neon;

We are exactly the same age.

I am America, nearly dead on a curb. She is England,
Travels by way of mud-plugged mushrooms.

Says she’s given up looking for a rabbit.

Alice has taken to healing, watches the world as it blends.

Maybe it’s all building, a hospital. The doctor tells me

I’ve ruptured my spleen.

She sits on the end of my bed that rises with a switch.

I hang from tubes and needles, still a girl no less.

Not imagined, but real.

Not blonde, but brunette. Not British, but broken.

My IV leaks—makes weather, comes water. It rains

For eight days, fresh wet road

Outside a frame of window. Sun again, sky rips in half.

Alice is ripped from a book. We talk about poetry.

Nobody knows what it is.

I trust everything: the cure, the doctor, all sharp things

That make me better, make me new. Alice asks, but Lisa,

What does the spleen really do?

Not sure, but I know how it feels when it bursts, spilling

Over other organs with blood. We talk about living.

Sometimes cells mount words,

Come before. I can’t be a poet with a broken body,

But they keep coming back, swirling around us,

Saying strange things—

England glows green. The moon is clisping.

Strawberry grass grows up to the stars.

You need a new word, she says, for what you do.

Call it epiphany, call it a lime, a religion. It isn’t words,

It isn’t life. It’s something else.

Can’t you see what you’re doing, looking into a big cliché—

Forests of trees without leaves, a bitter afternoon, your body

Sucked of blood, narrowing for clarity?

-Lisa Markowitz