Being put in a refrigerator for two years does
havoc
to time,
drops you out.
My arm is a rag at my side.
My blue eyes turn brown.
I study the world outside, the way streaks of rain twist
the pavement that had always been straight,
smear the bark of the alder. Too much life happens on the
other side of this window.
The promise of a billion
… tomorrows. I feel gravity
push ache deep
inside, rapturous moments
caught on midnight branches, . . . restless
between bedsheets.
People in body bags are headed to . . .
The word hides, demur under the table. I am unsure how
to get to its common
cloister, fugitive sound folded in . . .
lacunae
of my brain.
My mom’s pearl bracelet
snapped across
a subway platform.
It’s a 90s cassette rewinding on Nashville roads to
ballet class. I was as clueless as ever,
a gardenia erupting into song.
My mom reminds me
here is the stop sign,
the bookshop that sells sliced Granny Smiths with their grilled cheese,
the day
before I was born.
She teaches me
this is a body
on loan to me. These are bones that move.
She clips my rough toenails, locks my parched knees beneath the
hospital gown as the attending enters.
She mouths pages of words that
flick
off in synaptic
misfires—
the list of medicines, the calendar year, random inflamed nations of
names my stroke
tears out
of me: ice packs, lidocaine patches, my physical therapist, whole
years at college, nasal cannulas, George Harrison, toilet paper, that overpass
called hope.
Language dies like my papa—
in the silent solitude of ordinary dusk with shy
wastelands where
there were towers of . . .
fragments of
a life that can
no longer be
lived.
She extends the footrests of my wheelchair,
plants my right foot, ushers my right arm into a sleeve, zips my coat.
No one knows
how good I’m getting at
forgetting—
starved inevitabilities closing in
behind us as garage doors. But it’s life that
seals at our backs.
My dad tells me
I am enough, loved even, in the chilled
black bags of darkness,
at every dawn,
that . . .
connects.
The highway out
of the inkwell from which
all our days are written.
What of our ways, stories woven
not in lines but in Möbius strips? We are shell and memory rising up
into nightmares.
Time was never supposed to have ended, not at 27—
my mom cradling
my hemorrhaging head, my dad strewn in
sturdy fences of muscle on my recliner.
The glowing windows of houses of childhood lift up like galaxies into
wings
that travel us far when we have …
else to go, the Ford out of gas, the route
dissolved. The old life we lived fondly
is unchanged.
Life means what it always meant. We just never meant for it to mean
anything, for its cryptic secrets to dock
at our ears.
My name is …
a simple girl cartwheeling in that blue nightgown
through azaleas in the backyard who …
draws breath, feels it flutter
against her every toe.
I open my mouth to speak
but jammed words nearly realized like this … life
suspended—
purgatory on the tip
of the tongue
never
forever out
of reach.
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz 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).
