“What brings you in today?” She asks
after charging into the white light exam room
as if bombs fall outside.
The war, 5000-miles away
Have blasted my insides
The arguments
Undamming rivers in my internal caverns
Interrupting my day like a ritual
Dehydration. Dizziness
What I keep to myself:
Thoughts of the hostages
harden in my stomach,
The dead, float like
ghosts in my mind.
It was like this once before, I say
when the Towers fell with my cousin inside.
Only now, do I think:
Maybe he wasn’t inside at all?
“I was in the army,” she says.
“Iraq”, “PTSD…”
I imagine her by the waters of Babylon
holding a soldier’s hand
while insides spill.
For the length of a medical visit
my imagination roamed the wreckage of another’s mind
and hers, mine.
I leave, onto tests
with answers as elusive as a page of TalmudThe rabbinic compendium of lore and legend composed between 200 and 500 CE. Study of the Talmud is the focus of rabbinic scholarship. The Talmud has two versions, the main Babylonian version (Bavli) and the smaller Jerusalem version (Yerushalmi). It is written in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic.
and return to months of more bombs,
more dead,
more haunted, living people.
