ASHLEY-ELIZABETH BEST
The Rusty Toque | Issue 3 | Poetry | October 12, 2012
PROCEDURES/INVESTIGATIONS Doctor says to his student,
she is sexually active, monogamous, not pregnant. They curve around my bed, eyes flaming over charts, trying to remember, it seems, to be softer. After all, she is human. Treatments will consist of hormones, birth control pills. Wait to see if the mass will reabsorb into the body. ... but the pain. Can it be safe to take back what cannot work its own way out. I am all the angles of this room, spinning electric, hollow where the bright bush jumps first. ENDOMETRIOSISShe dreamed of adhesions,
her body's little vessel lifting its sails. The blood present for a month, a wet oasis. She hitched up her skirt, traced the bones, the ice-edged bottom of her being. She didn't know her ovaries, devotion to a calm body shut like a stone. HEALTHY HUSBAND, ILL WIFEAfter a sore night, and a living kiss,
something about his rough nuzzle and the constant washing made me blanche. He sands them red till they look like soft gloves. The bird-bone grace in those flightless fluttering beats, rung me out of sleep to stare hot-eyed into dawn. NIGHT NURSEThe nurse's response is different in the morning from what it was in the night. I was fixated on her—passion came as tethered words, like speaking to a hawk on fire. Her gaze shifted, and in this moment, this fragile motion, my tumbled bones snarled forward, pubic bone thrust as proof. Her skittering gait lets me forgive the cold probe, the knife-creased memories on her face. The beast hauled in these veins, the threat of an intense beauty. |
Other poems from this series, "Presenting Complaint" and "Findings," were published in Ditch.
ASHLEY-ELIZABETH BEST is from Cobourg, ON, Canada. She was on the poetry shortlist for the 2011 Matrix Litpop Awards and Prism's Poetry Prize 2012. She has poetry appearing, or forthcoming in the Red River Review, In/Words, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Prick of the Spindle, Tampa Review, Fox Chase Review, CV2, and Branch Magazine. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Cactus Press in Toronto called Slow States of Collapse.
ASHLEY-ELIZABETH BEST is from Cobourg, ON, Canada. She was on the poetry shortlist for the 2011 Matrix Litpop Awards and Prism's Poetry Prize 2012. She has poetry appearing, or forthcoming in the Red River Review, In/Words, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Prick of the Spindle, Tampa Review, Fox Chase Review, CV2, and Branch Magazine. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Cactus Press in Toronto called Slow States of Collapse.
