Artifacts of Jupiter
I Can’t Be Turning Thirty
1.
I remember my body, that brief spell persisting but an hour, its sheen in the bath water-licked rolls of belly one pressed against another blueprint of veins on porcelain the rusted tap a paisley pink towel hanging on its hook flip flops and dirty toes the secret flowering of breasts the epiphany of a groin harbingers shouting: Where are you going, girl?
2.
Sirens whine through the night erase the memory of every text message unsent every social media post unposted
Misdiagnosed for months after the stroke my seventh cranial nerve weeping, a tilted frown the doctors’ anarchy of voices no fingers to grip in the cold-numb
My god an iron lung hardly pumping bags of dust in and out
3.
Outside, December jogs by like a freight train twilights deliver fuchsia textiles of eyes frostbitten planes of faces
My father whistles Mozart’s 11th piano sonata I pretend I don’t hear worry on his tongue he shuffles outside my bedroom like he’s going high-up in an office building with tiny windows in a neighborhood he doesn’t know
4.
The starched anonymous pedestrians: Are you ok? a whole world I cannot touch cellophane I cannot crack a dried-out egg on my idle back
Photographs visit me— my existence, grocery bills and tickling grasses coaches to and from Boston straightened research papers in hands smiles, lust intact formulas of light and darkness falling from me like diadems hugging their phosphorescence
The limb of the willow demands nothing of life
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elaine Miriam went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).