Autopsy

By JANUARY GILL O’NEIL

 

I have read the report—inconclusive.
Yet, I know how much your brain weighs,

your liver, your heart. Your ordinary,
damaged heart. I know it by the gram.

I think about the last hands to touch you,
your cool body fully fixed in rigor.

Hospital band around your left wrist,
a tag on your right great toe.

Your eyes were unremarkably blue.
Once, I told you you’d be dead in five years

and I was right. I have forgiven myself
for saying that awful thing people say

when they can’t hear their own joy,
when anger becomes connective tissue,

when you looked at me like a stranger,
already estranged from this life to the next.

This is not an elegy or an apology,
the lungs taking in too much water—

this is a memory coming up for air.

 

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding; Misery Islands, winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and Underlife. She is an associate professor at Salem State University and serves on the boards of AWP, Mass Poetry, and Montserrat College of Art. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil is the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where she lives with her two children this academic year.

[Purchase Issue 19 here.] 

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Autopsy

Related Posts

Image of a tomato seedling

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine  

ALEX AVERBUCH
Russians are already in Starobilsk / what nonsense / Dmytrovka and Zhukivka – who is there? / half a hundred bears went past in the / direction of Oleksiivka / write more clearly / what’s the situation in Novoaidar? / the bridge by café Natalie got blown up / according to unconfirmed reports

A Tour of America

MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER
This afternoon I am well, thank you. / Walking down Main Street in Danville, KY. / The heavy wind so sensuous. / Last night I fell- / ated four different men back in / Philadelphia season lush and slippery / with time and leaves. / Keep your eyes to yourself, yid. / As a kid, I pledged only to engage / in onanism on special holidays.

cover for "True Mistakes" by Lena Moses-Schmitt

Giving the Poem a Body: Megan Pinto interviews Lena Moses-Schmitt

LENA MOSES-SCHMITT
I think sometimes movement can be used to show how thought is made manifest outside the body. And also just more generally: when you leave the house, when you are walking, your thoughts change because your environment changes, and your body is changing. Moving is a way of your consciousness interacting with the world.