Sunflowers
The sunflowers are too excitable in October.
How white everything is in the snowed-in quiet.
At my back, the world flares
into being.
I am nobody, withered
child-sized.
The light doesn’t know itself until it hits
these hands, that wall, this cot.
The moon shades in its marble.
The earth holds its breath.
I give my body over to machines and my day-clothes to
aids.
I give my name and my history to
an attending.
I am a propped-up head between pillows and
bedsheets,
an eye between white lids that won’t shut.
Nurses pass by like gondoliers in bile-green scrubs.
My body is a stone to them, they care for it as tides
care for their stones, smoothing them as they run
over.
They bring me needles of numbness, they
bring me dreamless stupor.
I lose myself in bells of IVs tolling
like our suitcase we couldn’t find at Florida’s baggage
claim.
Hooked up to monitors, I am a sick statistic—
a curiosity shop of bottoming-out
heart rate and oxygen saturation.
Doctors mumble, how is she alive?
My mom paces out her worry in the corner of the ICU.
She weeps, mutters, I pray she doesn’t hear me to my dad,
her staccato voice questioning if she counts as a mom.
Her ghastliness hooks into my skin
like a snagged-on reel.
I must let go of my 27-year-old file folder
hanging on to my street address and identity.
As usual, I was carrying too many things.
Nurses sponge bathe me clean of my scientific
career.
I am too pure, a sudden monk.
I watch my skateboard, my promising CV, my armoire of tie-dyed cotton
water out of sight.
I only want to be empty, bare of all but a wrist tag and hospital gown.
I don’t want smug flowers standing in my sickroom.
The sunflowers’ colors hurt me, weigh me down
like golden dumbbells tied to my ankles.
I only want what the dead eat, the last rite of vacant peace.
The sunflowers turn to me, watch me from the sill.
Nobody watched me before, now an entire ward watches me.
I efface myself. I have no face.
The sunflowers consume my oxygen.
I am a left-sided
shadow
cropped by the eyes of daylight
and the eyes of the manifold petals.
Not so far away, screams so rending that hearing them is to never be the
same.
The world is all cut-outs, slips and steps
down the slopes
to where we no longer expect to be saved.
We cry, I need you to the poplar, the woodpecker, the hunched-over man sobbing
without shame holding his own hand in sympathy.
We cry out to anyone willing to
listen to every word of our talk about everything.
The afternoon is twilight. The day lives us and in
exchange
we it.
I watch time decay through the window.
The sky bruises itself periwinkle purple-blue and the wet street reflects the rain, the breakup
of the wind on its helpless face.
Laid out under the clouds, the world looks so haggard.
The weather is stuck like a record.
What have these days of living and being lived taught us? It seems life explains
nothing of itself.
I wake up to the fired light of my hemorrhage, to orderlies snapping prescription orders and to
the stalks of sunflowers.
I do not know how to hold all
the sorrow and beauty of my life.
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).
