Doctor, the crow’s feet by your eyes run deep,
and I am grateful for that.
Doctor, I hope your baby slept through the night,
that your lover didn’t leave you yesterday,
that it is not the anniversary of
a parent’s death.
Please hold tightly to all that you have learned.
Let the sight of stainless steel and fluorescent lights please you.
Hold to all the nights you stayed close to books and
measurements and labs. Recall your love for math,
the feeling of falling in love with chemistry.
Don’t think about the grocery list,
or the pull of the tides off Ocean Beach.
Just measure and calculate, and measure again,
and watch me breathe.
The ocean will be there. Your lover
will make you dinner tonight; your baby
is healthy and well rested.
Just put me under, enough not to feel and hear,
and pull me up —
in my new body, pieced together with fat and sutures
and threads that dissolve over time. Let me
open my eyes and see both questions and answers,
both nightfall and dawn,
the stars I always wish upon,
the questions on my children’s faces.
Bring me back for yet another moment at the too-long red light,
where I can run my left hand through a fistful of hair,
tangles from the smallest knots tugging the roots, a strand
caught between my fingers.