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.
Nausea by Elizabeth Loudon | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser
Elizabeth Loudon is a novelist and poet living in southwest England. Her debut novel A Stranger In Baghdad was published in 2023 by the American University in Cairo. Her poetry appears in, among others, Blue Mountain Review, Amsterdam Review, Saranac Review, Whale Road Review, Southword, and Sho Poetry Journal. When not writing, she spends as much time as possible outside.
