The Teaching Hospital

Interns gather around a rare specimen:
my hands splayed out before them.
The surgeon points to tender joints.
A camera clicks a sneer of cold command.

A swarm of eyes murmur at my sheghost­—
a body that no longer understands
its own mass and weight, cannot grasp
what is asked, cannot move as it should.

I used to love to rowdydance,
move through crowds lickety-split.
Now I am a crooked stick, inked, extinct
wheeled on a gurney under bright lights

into a sterilized room,
my nodules and joints entombed
to teach the faculty of deformity,
how to retrofit my delicate ball bearings.

If the interns listen closely they can hear
the fluttering bats in the cave of my heart.
Velvety wings unhinge when the drilling starts.

Gazelle

In Song of Songs and Persian love poems
hooves and horns roam
softly through wide-open plains.

Fleet of foot,
herds spar in dry season.
They extract water from plants

without taking a drink.
Their purpose is to seek shade
and avoid activity.

All my life I’ve wanted to be a gazelle,
but I was born some other thing
made to inhabit this body until it wears thin.

But o, the ash leaves,
the blue stubbled-skulled
grasslands of where I want to be.

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University in Salem, MA.  She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s worked in the editorial department at Harper & Row in New York and has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, Birmingham Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016 and was a runner-up in the 2013 Boston Review poetry contest. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.