by Larry D. Thacker
Use no pair of delicate, innocent looking tweezers.
No gleaming, newly manufactured scalpel.
Steam-cleaned and perfected
stainless steel does me no good.
But that rusty pair of jagged forceps, forgotten
for so long, recently dug out of a physician’s kitchen drawer,
the crust-ridden ones, those are a different story.
They were in a woman’s abdomen once.
Surrounded with the fire of her day. Burnt clean.
So clean they were silent and satisfied, sleeping,
left behind like a kid at a filling station in the desert.
Diana was her name. She winced when the MRI machine
spun-up, started its search. Like many women, they didn’t
believe her at first. Until she crawled out of the machine,
screaming, Get it out! Get this out of me!
She’d only thought she was possessed up until then,
arguing with the voices in her body.
How could someone, a physician, hungover or not,
so carelessly leave a tool inside another person’s body?
That’s it, get those. Yes.
Don’t scrape off whatever that is, leave the taste.
This shouldn’t be sanitary and flavorless. Nothing should
ever be, don’t you agree? I knew I liked you for some reason.
Now fasten those clamps down — tighter —
I don’t want to move at all, lest I break more of you
than only your heart when I begin begging you
to cease this lovely favor,
as new tongues of pain,
confusion slobber out like alien profanities
I’ll have no translation for when we’re finished.
So don’t ask.
Now, for this one terrible and splendid favor,
I’ll never ask another thing of you.
In this lifetime, at least.
Rx: The right hemisphere is the target.
Soul of creativity, enemy of analysis,
where the qualifier rages out at the quantifier,
abstractions run amuck. There’s something
in there. Dangerous. And you can have it
once it’s out. I don’t care where it goes.
Just know this is ultimately your choice.
Dig deep and fast — let it know you mean business.
It thinks — if it can think — it’s well hidden.
Somewhere in the folds, in the fields under the skull,
behind the seed of the third eye, my soul,
dead center of my head.
When I stiffen with the first jolt, that shocking jab, use it
to your advantage, the worm will move, rolling and rolling,
rolling and rolling. And I’ll be screaming, of course.
Just keep my jaw still, for god’s sake.
Stay focused through my right ear.
They say it’s wormlike, tape-ish, having no real face
to speak of, unless it has adopted mine (check
when it’s out, please), perhaps a hand or arm here and there.
Creative monster within a monster, both feeding
on the myth of the other, this internal freak
of nature hidden behind the skull’s softening curtain.
But don’t squeeze too hard. Don’t leave such a dying
thing expanding in me.
When you
get it out,
you own it.
Eat freely but quickly. This is not a thing
you want to take responsibility for
setting upon the world if
it gets away from
you.
Larry D. Thacker’s poetry is in over 150 publications including Spillway, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, The Lake, Illuminations Literary Magazine, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include three full poetry collections, Drifting in Awe, Grave Robber Confessional, and Feasts of Evasion; two chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train; as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. His MFA in poetry and fiction was earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at: larrydthacker.com. On Twitter @thackalachia. On Instagram @thackalachia.
