“Medicine” by Jackson Burgess

You could spend half a lifetime trying to learn what another body needs, and believe me, I have, making eyes at the showerhead, poking holes in water balloons. My bad times brought me to Mercy Hospital, where I watched doctors flush saline through my veins and tasted nauseous ocean. Bad times fingering the hole in my neck where they threaded a tube to my belly, bad times grieving the veins they killed. Last night in a dream, I let the doctors catch my best friend because it meant I could escape, and then I watched through a window as they opened his brain. With each prod in a different place, a new part of him squirmed, until they’d learned to work him like a marionette. He looked at me in my window and said, Now look what you’ve done, and laughed. One time, I found my bad times in an orange bottle of codeine and discovered the funhouse behind my eyes. Rabbits and opossums congregated at my doorstep, bar backs looked at me like I was diseased. And in all my bad times, you were watching—I could feel you in the walls. I missed you like a hole misses its shovel, empty, full of air.

You could spend half a lifetime trying to learn what another body needs, and believe me, I have, making eyes at the showerhead, poking holes in water balloons. My bad times brought me to Mercy Hospital, where I watched doctors flush saline through my veins and tasted nauseous ocean. Bad times fingering the hole in my neck where they threaded a tube to my belly, bad times grieving the veins they killed. Last night in a dream, I let the doctors catch my best friend because it meant I could escape, and then I watched through a window as they opened his brain. With each prod in a different place, a new part of him squirmed, until they’d learned to work him like a marionette. He looked at me in my window and said, Now look what you’ve done, and laughed. One time, I found my bad times in an orange bottle of codeine and discovered the funhouse behind my eyes. Rabbits and opossums congregated at my doorstep, bar backs looked at me like I was diseased. And in all my bad times, you were watching—I could feel you in the walls. I missed you like a hole misses its shovel, empty, full of air.