Blood Draw at MGH
The curtain has an orchid waxing gibbous stain,
a quarter inch grape jelly moon giving to off-beige fabric.
The cloth spreads itself, completing the three walls.
My throat words my birthday into overbright air.
The tech holds a little mosquito with big wings.
This tourniqueted me consists of many me’s,
and once the surface on the arm’s nook is bitten,
a flow of me’s will enter the bug’s nose,
which will carry us to tiny fast clean sieves,
so the strained out lithium can be weighed.
The separated me’s will drip from the machine
into a runoff of chemicals and selves,
pass through the copper colon of the hospital,
hitchhike on the water cycle, and fall just north of Revere.
The air loosens, the mosquito withdraws,
and I allow it to be another needle.
A hand gauzes the hole where me’s peek out,
in a smudged curious circle, before the shower at home.
About the Author: Jade Kleiner is a writer from New England. Among other places, her poetry can be found in Trampoline and manywor(I)ds, her haiku in Haikuniverse and Cold Moon Journal, and her fiction in Bright Flash Literary Review. She is transgender and has practiced in the Plum Village tradition since 2020.
Image Credit: Peter Dybdahl “Blodkredsløbets forgrening i kroppen” (1881) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.
As It Ought To Be 