To Shahed Belbeisi

The syringe lays sterile on the tray next to the sterile gloves, sterile blood thinners, and sterile saline water—all placed in a delicate row like apparatuses of an elegant procedure resembling a buffet.

Drip, drip, drip, drip

It’s nothing but an auditory hallucination that is egged on by my eyes as they linger there on the sac and they speak to me once again: Drip, drip, drip, drip. It’s been fastened into the pick-line that’s gone septic twice on the right arm. Thrice will probably be the lucky one. “We will put the chemo-I mean, ‘medicine’ in you for about six months before we can see if it’s working or not.” Why was Dr. Huthlos so adamant about calling it “medicine”?

My arm is getting numb. It has been stationary like this for the last hour, and has rendered itself immobile; my hand is hovering above the arm of the sofa in complete tension. I smell fear in my perspiration mixing with the chemicals, seeping out of my pores like swirls of disease like in ancient Maya Codices. Maybe, this poison won’t run its corrosive route diligently enough or maybe it will run diligently enough rendering me fatally ill. “It’s all a balance” the trapeze artist says; tempting me to say the litany of Catholic chants I learned as a child.

In the chasm of death we see ourselves in a vestige of lucidity staring back gaunt and forever alleviated. A life should not be called a happy life until it is reduced to its thunderous finale like a Tchaikovsky piece, and then only then, is when the weights must come out and make their consensus. But what an absurd abstract thought, only an ancient Greek could come up with that one. There is no measure to a life for it is infinite. There is the tumultuousness, the chasm of existence and its experience. Our names remain in anonymity but the ethics

behind the lived life will endure in the remembrance. A wise philosopher once said that a true work of art (as is life) echoes on for eternity through the idea behind the object. That is, if we strive to cast our pebbles without the anticipatory gaze of recognition. As I face deaths’ countenance, I too, think of the many times I have looked at others and wanted to be seen, or recognized. But now I see, I see my folly.

The charts close onto themselves.

Drip, drip, drip . . .

drip, drip.

I close my eyes for a second to relieve myself of the constant “tick” I see in the “drip.” I swallow my saliva and sink into my childhood with new-found teeth onto buttered toast. The wallpaper is peeling off in the treatment room revealing a murky white wall. It does not take long before my eyes become fixated on something . . . algo que supura de la pared blanca.

Snap, snap, snap.

Stale fingers snapping in my face and I can only stare back at them, I am back there again. “. . . and that’s what the Bible says on the matter . . . eh-chi, tu! pon atención! Yes, Nicté ¿ahora que?” The Bible closed onto itself.

Another question? Yes, another question slipped out of my mouth even though cautious eyes mouthed a “not-again” in the countenance of catechism children. It wasn’t long before I found myself in a cold sterile office, much like this present chair, with the priest I had known all the nine short years of my life. “You ask too many questions. Too many. Our faith calls upon believing . . .” Those words hung like a cloud of dust and debris over my head. “God will not show himself to you if you question. But if you believe . . .” there it was again. That word accompanied by a man’s finger pointed towards the heavens (well, the ceiling) and a closing statement “. . . if you believe God will show himself to you.” Believe. “But God gave me a brain.” “Yes, and?” “Then I think and because I think, God wants me to question.” He blankly stared at me, leveled out a sigh, and dispatched me back to the classroom.

I stopped believing then. I stopped my prayers then. I stopped kneeling before the saints and their rubbed-out feet by believers that left them bejeweled and glistening as if they had come alive and walked on a sea of salty tears. My God asked questions. Synapses were firing through neurons tucked away in the gyri and sulci of my brain, and thoughts and questions, questions and thoughts were percolating in a whirl resolving in their own logic. My mind saw pensamientos for what they were: vital, exploring, dangerous for some, delirious for myself, and they wanted me to turn it off. “Mi religión es buscar la verdad . . . aun a sabiendas que no he de encontrarla . . . ,” is an echo chamber for me.

Drip, drip, drip, drip.

There is sunlight peeking through now that the sun is setting, which warms my eyes, as it is streaming in through the window before me. A division created by the atrocities, a symbol, a construct, the glass window. I look down and notice for the first time in an hour that the arms of the sofa have been rubbed off; the threads outstretched and sparse letting the yellow foam underneath protrude. It is as if incessant scratching and pulling at the threads led to its desentripamiento. Anxiety creeps up in the most interesting mannerisms.

The left arm that is not connected to the machine is picking at the chair as my eyes slowly make their way to the limb. My nails are now digging into the armchair as they would whenever we bought fresh mushrooms from the Farmers Market on Saturdays at Virginia Park . . . bits of their skin, bits of their dirt underneath my nails. The smell of dirt that permeated my hands and reminded me of a home away from home. That arm and hand have had a mind of their own these days. The hands are no longer the hands that I had grown accustomed to. The skin looks like delicate moth wings draped over cavernous veins. Hands reflect a passage of time. Has time left me?

I look out the window, Rafaela sits to the left of me, she stares out too. It is a vacuum of scenes riddled densely before us of promulgated micro and macro visions of Americana too solid to masticate but must be swallowed whole. And you appear there with a sign near the highway locked in a stance in limbo like Lázaro—crumpled and forgotten, and to your right, smashed Happy Meals clogging the sewage drains. Rafaela leans in closer with graying glaucoma eyes, but the right one sees more clearly and with that eye she leaps out with her sight. There are the children she fed her tamales and elotes on Pico Blvd. I remember the many summer days that we would chase after her with our dollar in hand for her warm gifts. But now she tells me plastic Cafes and stores where they sell macrame are where the kids hang these days.

And through the open windows of the apartments in front of us, a TV blaring: another young man shot dead by LAPD, and in a distant land not so distant bombs drop on poets and they become poems that take flight. Down the block the deputies are stroking their pistols, the empty stroller, the baby dropping the toy down the drain pipe, the fists riding in unison, the diasporic sea crashing down with a llanto that cannot be forgotten that echoes of generations and can be heard if we decide to listen; there is always a choice.

Her voice, once booming, is now entrenched by something slowly crawling and growing through her esophagus and webbing into her eyes. And in her oculus I see the divine peering back at the world, at you, at me, at all that is that they thought we would forlorn in the wake of our heartbreak. Her voice while haunted by a growing apparition in her throat still stentoriously shakes the ground beneath us; her voice is the flapping of a hummingbird’s wings that soothes my furrowed brow like Mictecacihuatls’ kiss, descansa, mija. Esta batalla es larga, necesitas todas tus fuerzas. The cracks in the Simmons bricks are growing weeds. Something older and wiser is taking root underneath the brick and concrete slabs. History is calling us back, breaking the bricks and letting the shrubs and weeds run free; they never uprooted us.

Can truth deliver us from evil?

She scans the landscape with her more capable eye until it is a little wet, and then turns to me with a pained smile. She closes her eyes not because the sunlight bothers her but as a sign of repose to those maneuvering around her; the smile accompanies her into the dream. I look at her hands and then look at mine. I can see cells multiplying beneath my skin. I peer out. Wanting, begging, to let out a scream, an enchanting scream that will break away at the spell of my paralysis.

Can she help me see?

I stare out into the hallway. It is there.

It is staring back at me along with the velvety infinite void looming like a beating heart; like the ritual drums of my childhood. The infinite spreading its cloud of invisible whispers enveloping me, sending me into a maze, while Mare stands over me. The weight crushing my chest is no match for the acknowledgment that I am not alone in this fraught battle, but still I am rendered immobile, my tongue clenched between my own teeth.

“Name your demon,” a benevolent disembodied voice says, encouraging me to unleash my caged tongue.

Cioran lays on top of me at the edge of his own despair; dogeared, crumpled, highlighting his half-truths so I remember exactly what not to be in these moments of terror.

The syringe lays sterile on the tray next to the sterile gloves, sterile blood thinners, and sterile saline water—all placed in a delicate row like apparatuses of an elegant procedure resembling a buffet. Eyes scanning.

Drip, drip,

drip

…Drip,

Eyes. Scanning.

Daisy Elizeth Magallanes (she/they) is a Chicana poet and writer born and raised in Los Ángeles. Their poetry has been published in the Acid Verse Literary Journal and their short fiction in the Black Warrior Review. They have works that are forthcoming in Brevity, and Huizache. When they’re not hanging out with their cat, Barthelme, and chihuahua, Buddy, they can be found sorting through archives.