Symptomatic
I saw five doctors.
One for my stomach
coiled tight, the nausea
and stabbing ache
that disappeared
after we last spoke
and never returned.
Another for my crooked spine,
misaligned by two car wrecks
years earlier: the electric
shock waves that lashed
toward my neck’s base
whenever I sat for too long
or stood up too quickly.
The next three doctors
were specialists I asked about
the sensation of gasoline
poured over an open wound
that rivered into my crotch
whenever I was touched there,
none of whom diagnosed
pelvic floor disorder.
Of the excess protein spikes
piercing my liver
even ten years past my last drink,
I felt no discomfort
just mild amusement each time
a new doctor looked terrified
at the results from my 27 year old
blood. You rubbed my stomach,
massaged my back, touched me
softly as you could. Compassion
you never let me show to you.
To you, the pain was weighted
in your blood. When I tried
to help you carry it, you thought
I was cutting you open.
At the Edge of Nothing
There was a sheep you bought for nothing
from a farmer in the night.
The sheep was a pile of stringy cloth
that collapsed when you touched it.
There was dirt and you
screaming into it, face so close
the dust colored your nose.
There was a house
growing daisies on the roof,
the knowledge of right and wrong
but turned upside down
like a child standing on her head.
Grass stretched in every direction
where cattle laid quietly
hiding from the hornets that droned above.
We spoke to each other there
like we spoke anywhere, knives
sheathed in the loose skin of our hips
and mouths moving slower
than understanding.
In the yard, we drank milk
from each other's cupped hands
and showered in the rain.
Inside, picture frames lined every inch
of the walls, but no pictures
inhabited them.
The frames were glossy enough
to reflect the outlines of us moving past
but not enough to make out the small dimple
in my left cheek
that you placed your finger in
each night before bed
and fell asleep like that.
Each time we fell asleep, we died.
Each time we woke up, our hearts
restarted in matching rhythm.
Everything we did was trying
to stay that way.
Jarrett Moseley is a bisexual poet living in Miami, where he was a James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami's MFA program. He is the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024). His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Baltimore Review, earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and been long listed for the Poetry Society’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems are featured in Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, AGNI, Poets.org, and elsewhere.