The Right Side

A poem for a body that is falling apart

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

This is not one of my better poems. It’s clunky and too direct, and I honestly don’t like it very much. I’m sharing it anyway. I’m tired, I feel like a pincushion, and my mind is one giant field of fog. These are the only words in my head right now. I don’t have the energy or the focus to make them sound prettier. So here they are.

---

When MS first attacked my nerves,
the right side of my face went numb.
It began in my tongue, a creeping
tingling that spread to my jaw,
my lips, my cheek, my scalp.
I could not eat on the right side
of my mouth because I didn’t know
if I was chewing anything at all,
and I did not want to choke
on all the things I could not feel.

When MS next attacked my nerves,
my right leg lost its luster. It collapsed 
under the weight of millimeters
of scar tissue, the muscles tightening
in spasms of defeat. My knee buckled,
my hip lost its place, unable
to compensate for an uneven gait.

When my hands when numb, I assumed
that MS was back for more. But this time
it was only my spine acting up
of its own accord. A single disc,
at C5 and C6, bulged and compressed
the nerves on the right side of my neck.
My right shoulder is a shooting star
of pain, and my hands are flames
which refuse to go out.

Between my face
and my neck
and my shoulder
and my hands
and my hip
and my leg
I didn’t think there was anything left
to take from my right side. But now
there is a nodule, a small cyst of
discomfort on the right side
of my thyroid. It might be more than
one. It might be on the left side, too.
We’ll see what the ultrasound says
when it paints with sound waves
a picture of what’s inside of me.
But for now I can tell you, the worst
of it is on the right. The worst
of everything is on my right,
but all I feel is wrong.

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THE REST

By Jane Huffman

Still, I keep myself, I take
to bed. One lung is red. Cut red
flowers hung in pink water.

My other lung is out of  line.
From one lung, I tell the truth.
From the other lung, I lie.
Cut pink flowers hung in red water.

Like a pain, the truth is mine.
The lie is that today I want to die.
Cut red water hung in pink flowers.

The rest of it is stillness, rest.
A soft cough into a hard pan.
A hard cough into a soft plane.
Cut pink water hung in red flowers