The Patron Saint of Broken Glass
To inhabit disaster is
To live
With a balloon animal in your chest,
A forced relaxation of the diaphragm.
To live
As if a train is crashing,
More often than not.
To assume
this night will not be over any time soon.
There are unspoken rules of this priesthood,
Even when the pain
To close one’s eyes and plead as only a mother knows how
To plead that no windows be replaced
With laceration and scar
Your windshields and picture frames are not safe here
Do you understand?
You are not safe here.
Endings
I am buying groceries at the end of the world.
Let me be clear:
I am not interested in whether the world
Is actually ending or if I just think it is.
That comes down to semantics.
We don’t have much time.
I am buying groceries at the end of the world because
Living in my body is like reading
The headline
“An Asteroid Like That Which Wiped Out the Dinosaurs Will Hit the Earth Tomorrow”
Every morning.
I pause in the aisle, dare I ask,
Should I splurge for brand name cereal?
New Dreams
I dreamed I coughed up my spine
A V of wild geese broken, scattering the hard cold sky
I kept saying help me
On escalators and up stairs
Trying to hold my back together with open fingers
Not sure if I would suddenly become paralyzed
I kept yelling help me and yet
Nobody would help me
Author Bio
Maya J. Sorini is a recent graduate of the Narrative Medicine Master’s program at Columbia University. She was raised in Maryland and went to college at Washington U. in St. Louis, where she also spent three years doing clinical trauma surgery research. Poetry allows her to cope with the stress of working in trauma and provides a creative outlet for healing. Her poems have appeared in Tendon Magazine and will be part of a multidisciplinary dance performance in St. Louis with Resilience Dance Company.
Twitter: @mayajsorini
Tags
#illness #anxiety #narrative medicine
Image Credits
Courtesy of the author.