Magnitude 7.1

When the earthquake comes
at night, you search first for your
glasses, then your shoes. A flashlight
would be a friend, a protector.
There is so much splintered

glassware. In the morning,
before the power returns, you
take in the ruins, the way your home,
your neighborhood, has been lifted up,
shaken, and dropped any which way.

You plot ways to get more bottled
water if there is enough cash, if
the corner market hasn’t run out yet
—water is the thing—but suddenly
not as important as chocolate. You

obsess about chocolate now as you
rattle through your grim medical reports,
locate your meds, and reconsider their
usefulness in the rubble of your life,
just wanting us back the way we were

before tests, procedures, and surgeries,
before meds and your pacemaker,
breathing treatments and machines
and all those scans; before the forgetting,
the missed cues, the mirrored dismay

of others; back the way we were before
this earthquake of lurching past your
body’s limits. Chocolate beckons: dark,
semisweet, Swiss, chocolate pecan turtles,
and fudgy toffee kisses.

Catherine Klatzker is the author of You Will Never Be Normal (Stillhouse Press, 2021) which won two awards at BookFest, Spring 2022, in the areas of Nonfiction > Psychology and Mental Health. Her memoir is “an instruction manual on falling apart to come together again,” having been blindsided by dissociative identity disorder (DID) and multiple personalities. Her work has appeared in mental health anthologies as well as a range of other publications including Atticus Review, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Tiferet Journal,  Emrys Journal, the NAMI blog, Please See Me, and others.