Cesarean

Tourniquet

A stranger is shaking too hard to tourniquet his arm
so I do it for him. I’m still pressed
against his side when he leads something blushing
like rust to the warm hole of his inner elbow.
I rub a circle into his wrist. Dart misses bullseye.
We are the only breathing bodies on the Red Line.

He stares at the open doors and speaks, my fist folded
around his. He’s standing at the edge of Lake Michigan,
he says, waiting for water to roll in. I can’t swim
so I watch his other hand lift above the waves.
The tremors wrinkle. He throws his arm wide,
forgets the syringe.

One morning he turned left on the beach
and watched a bird take off. It spread its white wings
this far and passed right by him, close enough
for its beak to kiss the bark on his shoulders,
the bruise on his brow. Silt makes bricks
of our shoes. The doors close. He plunges.

---

Alex Bortell is a Chicago-based poet. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, and has received support from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. His work appears or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Gulf Stream Magazine, the Mississippi Review, phoebe, RHINO, Split Lip Magazine, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere.