by Sandra Meek

Longing
extinguished the view, backlit

the body, that trapeze
of scars. Mother a sweet diffusion

down the pre-dawn hall. White bird.
Nurse’s cap folded

to papery wings.
I almost believed

in the wound erased, white towels
cradled in heat, the tweezers’ slender

silver wands. The leech she whispered
to the reattached ear’s

fresh seam, health
a side effect of hunger, saliva

undamming the blood gifted
with oxygen. Saturated, its work

done, she plucked, flushed
the fat black stitch to the darkened arteries

rooting the city, flesh
of my flesh, then nothing but spin.

*

Sandra Meek is the author of three books of poems, Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2008), Burn (2005), andNomadic Foundations (2002), and editor of Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark, 2007), winner of a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Twice awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 forNomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, she is Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, and Professor of English at Berry College.