He rolls my sleeve up,
his face dour and downcast.
He tells me all about his money problems.
How patients never pay on time
and how he's always behind the bills
The worst thing I did, he tells me, is start my own practice.
He runs his hand through his hair
and then uses them to pull my shirt away
and slide the stethoscope across my chest.
He asks me what I do for a living
and I tell him.
He nods. That's good, he says.
You'll always have a job.
Which makes me laugh.
At least you aren't a doctor, he tells me.
Big mistake.
He puts the needle in my arm
and I watch my blood fill the vial
slowly at first,
cautious,
and then gushing
so fast I think it will go everywhere,
fill this room, drown us both.
At the end of the appointment,
he puts out his hand and I take it.
He pulls me toward him, hugs me.
He holds on tight and says,
Take care of yourself. Please.
When I flip through the pages of the past,
it goes like this:
yesterday, with open windows
first neat and cut
laid out side by side
and then sloppy as I go back farther, towards childhood.
I remember the red door, the smell of the dog's food.
I remember the bookshelf low to the ground
page after page after page
and the murmuring groan of feet on hardwood,
rocking rocking chair
women cackles and coughing.
It goes on like this,
from the things I remember
to the parts I make up,
fill in like so much putty,
weave into ropes to
tamp down the tents.
Why not?
Tomorrow is just more flowers, bodily pink and spiked green.
It is only more kneeling at gravesites,
more ashes to scatter.
We will take off and put back on
the funeral clothes.
We will set and clear the table
as we have for generations.
All the births
except your own
are behind us now,
a soul like a marble,
round and glistening in your pocket.
You squeeze it tight, the way I used to.
You check your pockets,
padding down.
Frantic.
Is it still there?
Is it still there?
Well, is it?
I could have been the child who died there.
I think of this sometimes,
now that I am older and
try to keep a steely grip on this life.
We both could have,
laying at the bottom of the waterfall,
bloody,
floating,
spent,
like death thirsty lovers.
My parents would have buried their youngest,
not even out of high school.
My name would have been listed among
the others in the school year book who were dead by
Car accidents, disease, unknown sickness
and then me, bloody and crushed laying in the woods.
My mother would have tended to my grave,
My father would not come.
She would push her fingers through the dirt,
leaving dimples behind.
Flowers would bloom and die,
petals dropping.
Everything would chug forward,
one day, like a smoke filled train,
upon which I was not a passenger
and I would wait at the bottom,
in the sleek pool,
listening and waiting
for the ambulance that wasn't coming,
to the fading laughter and screams of the
mass exodus.
To the priest who would come to save
and then, in saving, damn and curse this place,
and leave my ghost behind in that glassy dirty water.
Ally Malinenko has been fortunate to have poems and stories published online and in print. Her second book of poems, Crashing to Earth, is fothcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. She currently lives in the part of Brooklyn that the tour buses don't come to.
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