Why I Don’t Date Surgeons
Tachycardia, he’d said. I feel it flutter
At night, lying on my back, I hear it.
I’m nervous, an empath who could benefit
from cognitive behavioral therapy.
My low-cut v neck, slight ripple of sternum
and ribs: How much wine per week?
I lean in, as if asking him to incise me,
crack the caged house to my aortic valve,
hold my bloody fluttering pulse with a gentle
gloved palm, place it back exactly so,
but my mind, it’s racing: headaches, insomnia?
I cross my legs, wrap one foot behind the other,
fold my arms. Look at my face,
open my skull under fluorescent bulbs,
unspool and expose my white and gray matter,
consciously sedate me,
discuss my frontal lobe,
on the smaller side: why I’m letting a man
I just met into my mind. Gently nudge
my hypothalamus, lean and press your eye
to microscope, find the images playing over
and over, press pause, erase, delicately swim
an instrument through my circuits, from the stem
through the thalamus to my cortex. Watch me dream.
Carefully close and suture
my bone flap, pull the IV tube
from my vein, unglove and descrub.
I won’t remember a thing.
In Response to Amy’s Question: What is Aspartame?
It is a sweetener,
an artificial, addictive, non-saccharide sweetener,
rapidly hydrolyzed in the small intestine,
and it breaks down, somewhere between your saliva enzymes and piss stream,
into components, one of them being formaldehyde,
the stuff that coats those dead sharks you buy in glass jars,
and those dead people you find in coffins,
and it is approved by the FDA,
the people who give a shit about you
and your likelihood of ending up in a coffin before thirty-five,
coated and preserved in formaldehyde,
with your lipstick painted on
in the glossy pink-sheen you’d imagined,
and you look quite nice,
because that formaldehyde has kept
your expired body from turning black,
and your lips so lifelike, your boyfriend can almost
imagine the way their light pink-sheen
left a liney smudge on your Diet Coke,
the silver can you pressed to your
pink-sheened lips, lips that swallowed
your calorie-free, non-saccharide sweetness
that swam through your organs,
morphing to dead body lacquer somewhere between
spit and piss, piss that had the capacity
to make your Aunt Sue sigh and tilt her head
saying how nice, how nice it is her lips still look so pink.
Marissa Stockton
Marissa Stockton is a poet and essayist from north Georgia. She earned her Bachelors in English from Brenau University and her Masters in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. She has been published in The James Dickey Review, So To Speak, The Gordian Review, Aurora Arts and Literary Magazine, and Voices and Visions, among others.
Photo by Marek Studzinski.
