Nausea
Even when I fainted on the dockside
I wanted to do it with grace –
a limp swan folding its wings among reeds.
I remembered my kin who long ago
sailed this way, all plunder and panic.
Who died here on this ragged edge of land.
I should do better, be grateful as prayer
to the weathered wood that receives
skin and flesh wrapped triple tight
around bones.
The view dissolved.
Too bad we’d a flight to catch. Men scooped me
into an ambulance. Face after face arrived,
asking for a number on a scale. My heart-beat
drowned in the salt-water pump, stuttered
to zero. My hand on death’s doorknob,
I saw the joker who’d welcome me
sooner or later, no matter how many drip-feeds
I tear from my arm. I shouted eleven
and put down your phone, then heard
what I’d missed for a morning: seagulls
thieving on the sidewalk outside,
beaks twisted open for fury, my rough kin
ceaseless in hunger, not a prisoner among them.
