NELLE 7 | 2024
but now they end in sleep
and a dream I can’t shrug off,
the way I shrug my shoulders
when I’m trying to rid myself
of some thought how many times a day?
Like the man I just watched
working the back of the trash truck
picking up each bin—lift, dump, shrug—
then on to the next one,
until the guy driving took his foot off the brake,
maybe to shift gears so they could make it
up the hill but instead
the heavy yellow truck rolled back
and for a second, I thought
something awful would happen,
but the man behind just gave a shout
and shouldered himself away
from the tailgate, then jumped aboard
for the ride. In birth, the shoulders
have to come out one by one—
the widest part of the baby’s body—
and sometimes one sticks
and the doctor or midwife has to break
the collarbone to free it. I think it’s good
we don’t remember this.
Once, I lay face down in an MRI tube
with the magnets’ boom
shifting all around me
and the operator’s voice
from a speaker deep within the machine
reminding me not to move
so the pounding could do its job,
could let her read each bright-dyed
detail, vessel, faulty part within my tissue,
and I couldn’t breathe,
needing to shrug to blur the memory,
decades old, of hands—his hands—
pressing down on me.
The pounding followed me out
to the street, where someone’s bass
in the car behind mine
thumped through my seat,
then home to my washing machine
thudding up the steep
basement stairs, and later that night
my own breathing,
rhythmic and deep,
woke me as if from a tunnel,
and I couldn’t shrug hard enough
against its walls to find my way back
to sleep.