The Nature of the Body of the Patient, and: The Patient as a Study in Vulnerability, and: The Patient Resembles, and: The Patient Dreams of the Land of the Healthy, the Healed

Abstract

The Nature of the Body of the Patient, and: The Patient as a Study in Vulnerability, and: The Patient Resembles, and: The Patient Dreams of the Land of the Healthy, the Healed Maggie Queeney (bio) The Nature of the Body of the Patient Was it a pet gifted to her at birth, or the wild animalbroken to bear and carry the load of her, drag the cartof her. A ribbon around the throat or a thin leather lash across her mouth. A seashell or wrapped in inchesof sweet fruit, bleeding juice before the rot. The sand.Covered in chain mail of charcoal scales or iridescent plumage. Her body is not the metaphor. Shelter is nota metaphor. What covers is not what sustains. The vehiclethat drags her closer inward, the car rumbling deeper into the dark glitter of the mine. Or that scatters like light,a flock, a herd, a cloud of silver bait fish. Thunderheadwith heat lightning flaring the dark boil of it, hail like seed pearls studded in the dark velvet, like seeds sleepinginside the dirt, waiting for the burn of wildfire to crackopen. The impressions teeth leave inside her cheeks. [End Page 25] The Patient as a Study in Vulnerability What to name the wound inside the wound,the Patient, thighs wrenched open into arrow, the deadly point halving each vertebrato the part in her hair. Where does the sky begin inside her air-swollen lungs. Is ladderin the legs or the rungs or the climb. What is time to the Patient, in her sterile, clocklessroom. To her, counting the tiny blue design in the surgical curtains. The Patientturns porous through her eyes and arms, mouth and palms, the slit under the moonlikemound between her legs. Her whole skin stretched thin over the fat and the bonesthe Patient calls home, but is closer to a makeshift tent, a beach shelter insidea hurricane. The hungry, empty eye of the Patient lidded in rings of howl.What she has seen and cannot see, after hours of staring into the years she neverwas able to say where it hurt, and how. [End Page 26] The Patient Resembles the lone photograph of a great-aunton her father's side, the spitting image of the Patient in sepia, in strange, lacetrimmedclothing, before she delivered in a home for unwed mothers. Before she, childless,breasts leaking a sweet milk, was committed for promiscuity, then electrocuted. Beforeshe was released back to the family that signed the intake forms, mute and unableto live alone. The Patient imagines she grew old like a candle, a softening from the topdown, head down, how the Patient has read a whole dead fish will rot. Her father told herthat it was what was done, back then, when a woman was not marriedand would not name the father. He only had to tell her once, when shewas thirteen. She learned to keep the invisible cage that carved a furrow into a wake,silent as a worm's burrow, deep enough to lay a woman's body inside, to sayas you look down, She looks so beautiful, as if she is sleeping, over the stilled featuresyou swore you had known, that were not you. [End Page 27] The Patient Dreams of the Land of the Healthy, the Healed How to return to a home she has never known. First memory of the Patient: staring into the sieve of the window screen, she drifts down the long hall her eyes pry into the blur, the whirl she clouds. She smears, bleeds, then floods out of her eyes. Her body grows smaller, flattened by the glass, a slide pressing her into cross-section, into outline. At the cellular level, she could not distinguish cloth from wood, metal from a virus from a drop of water. The body recalibrates to the speed of stems and leaves, the groaning honeycomb of an aquifer. The body learns to mimic the electricity coursing behind the wall: silent, still, and hidden. At this distance, everything happens and does not happen. There is the...