Thursday, June 23, 2022
Series
After - PTSD
in the firepit.
with too much pain for tears.
After - The Little Things
when I saw her lying there.
Sleeping peacefully,
long lashes resting
on her baby soft cheeks.
She was sucking her thumb,
just like she used to before.
After - Changing Bandages #2
We're home, and they still
won't let me see her hands.
Our neighbor doesn't
have to help with bandages
now, and somehow it's not
the process it used to be.
Ow!
Holy Crap!
She's learning new words
and she talks matter-of-factly
as my brother tells stories,
distracting her from the gauze,
the sterile, ointment-soaked
strips of cotton that my mom
wraps around each tender finger.
I falled in the fire-pit and
burnt my hands.
Eventually they let me
help, using gummy scissors
to cut the cloth into
manageable strips. They smell
pungently of hospitals and
rubbing alcohol, chemicals
that don't belong in our house,
or anywhere near someone
as young as two years old.
She giv'd me em n'ems
cuz I brave!
After - Elbows
She doesn't want to use
her marshmallow hands, but
turning doorknobs is tricky
with only two points of contact.
Her elbows are a giant pair of chopsticks
reaching up over her head
to grab the doorknob.
Reading is tricky, too
because her elbows
don't have fingers
for turning pages.
She has to use
one big, fat chopstick
to lift - somehow -
one page at a time.
They might as well
not be there, her hands.
She tucks them up
by her shoulders,
using her dimpled elbows
instead for everything.
She points with her elbows,
flushes the toilet with her elbows,
climbs into her chair with her elbows.
her hands are burned
and bandaged, so maybe
she's just pretending
they aren't there?
After - Changing the Bandages #1
Our next-door neighbor
came to help my mom
change the bandages while
Dad and the five oldest
siblings were away.
I don't want her
come over.
She writhes like an eel
on our neighbor's lap,
squirming and crying.
They tell her she's brave,
and she parrots it, with
tears streaming from her eyes,
cascading down her cheeks.
I brave, Mommy.
I so brave.
Every morning before
the other children are up,
and every evening after
the other children are in bed,
our neighbor comes to
do the dreadful deed.
Even a giant bag of
M&M's doesn't regain
a two-year-old's favor.
She sit over there.
She not come over here!
After - More Waiting
It's a short drive to the hospital,
but still too long
for my mom's anxious nerves.
Baby sits in her car seat,
a wet towel on her hands.
Too much all at once is overload
sending her into shock - a mercy?
Not crying, just whimpering,
shaking like a leaf, and
staring sightlessly straight ahead.
At covenant they gave her morphine,
wrapped her hands, and waited
two hours for an ambulance.
A family friend from church
was working in the ER that night
so he stopped in to give the baby a blessing.
More waiting, until mom, impatient,
decided to just drive
to the hospital with a burn unit
they wanted to send her to,
forty minutes away.
With narcotics on board, you'd think
nothing had happened.
She chattered like a squirrel
all the way to Hurley
where they did a debridement
to cut off all the dead, burned flesh,
then re-wrapped those little hands.
She picked up three
new stuffed animals that day:
a small, blue-green
beanie-baby bear, a sheep
(but the label said rabbit?)
with soft plush fur that didn't matter
because she couldn't feel it
through the bandages,
and a little brown horse
that sat like a dog and smiled.
They also gave her a little
patchwork quilt. She called it
her "Magic Carpet Ride"
and sang about it all the way home.
(Side note - the horse wasn't received until a later date when she went back for another debridement.)
The Event - Imagination
In my mind's eye I see her,
hands full, a marshmallow in each
to test their squishy softness
before stuffing them into her chubby cheeks.
Everything's sticky:
her hands, her face,
the front of her jacket,
even her hair
because it fell like a curtain
across her face until
she brushed it impatiently aside.
She marches
around the corrugated fire ring,
licking her fingers and mostly
just making a mess.
When she steps in a hole
in that uneven ground, her hands
come up to try and catch herself
as
she
f
a
l
l
s
Her hands sink
into the remnants of the campfire:
soft ashy white and
black glowing coals.
Someone is screaming.
Mom scoops her up pulls off her jacket and runs to the house through the doors and into the kitchen
turns on the cold water that's not cold enough because her hands her hands her hands are screaming.
Before - I Don't Like Waiting
Twelve hours.
I sit motionless, freed
from the pack, but not from my thoughts.
What was undefined is now known,
and I'm trying to digest.
I stare out the window without seeing
the tourist trap town
that had captivated us
when we passed it going
the other way. Now it is nothing
more than a blurry bit
of landscape passing by.
Eight hours.
We're listening to Dry Bar
on YouTube, trying to pass the time...
or trying to forget? I don't want
to remember, don't want to know,
don't want to think about
the horrific news, but it's like watching
a car accident and my thoughts
can't look away.
I draw lurid mental images
of something I didn't see, can't imagine.
Selfish, to laugh
when someone is suffering
so I try to picture it, but
I just don't know
what a child's hands look like
after they've been buried
in smoldering coals.
Two hours.
Have I slept?
I don't remember much of anything,
and the diesel engine's dull roar
is like a sound machine,
the constant noise numbing
the edges of my consciousness.
The uneven road rocks me
back and forth, the chatter
of my family is a lullaby,
coaxing me further and deeper into
sleep.
Before - Fatigue
The rain falls incessantly
on the hood of my raincoat
like a child tapping on a window:
persistent, loud, demanding attention.
It thunders through the trees,
hitting every leaf, every branch
on its way to the ground
where it becomes
mud - sucking on my boots
with every heavy step.
My companions are out of sight,
some ahead, some behind.
I am alone on the trail.
Just me and the rain, and
my backpack. Its straps dig roughly,
the pain has built gradually over
five days of the same weight
pressing into my shoulders, hips, and lower back.
That weight reminiscent
of the one on my mind,
a nagging, undefined disaster
that smolders, smokeless, out of sight.
An unscratchable itch, a heavy,
vague foreboding sense of something
gone badly awry - but what?
My thoughts are broken
by an exultant cry.
I lift my eyes with effort
and see the others waiting for me
at the tunnel's gaping mouth.
It extends through the darkness
to the light at the end. I'm almost there,
so I try to quicken my steps,
but my excitement is dampened
by the weight of the falling rain.
My plodding gait will not be hurried,
but I am coming. I'm coming.
At last.
by Emily Roy
(She wrote a series of poems in her poetry class at SVSU winter semester of 2022, about an event - Rosie's accident when she fell in the firepit and burnt her hands. She tells the story in a series of 9 poems and it's truly amazing. She captures details and emotions and truth. As horrible as the event was, I love the way she put these together and she is truly gifted, like her Grammy.)