Confessional

Emily
O’Neill

I. ECT

Every patient signs a release
for the rustling to stop.

The work begins before sun-up,
a plugging in at each temple
for the current to wash the moon
back into the sky.

First, a trickle of insects,
their legs dragging itch
into the skin as they escape.
Then, two black birds,
crows, quick and vicious.
Strung seashells, and ink,
so much of it, a tide pool,
then the breakers, the coast town,
the entire Atlantic gnawing at Boston
in stubborn hurricane.

The wind tears open
the window of a study, gulping
down book jackets. And then

the moon is lightness restored,
a tossed pebble. Simple to swallow
or stumble over. The pen on the release
dries and curls up off the desk, is worn
as a hospital bracelet.

 

II. “It is worst in the mornings.”

I set out mugs of milk.
I call upon the trees
again. Write a letter. Freeze
a week’s worth of dinners.
I finish another draft. I rise at four
each morning: the day stretches like a yelling
mouth. This must be what it is like to witness
your own transubstantiation.

When I get into the cab, the street is wet.
Not with rain, like something spilled.
I want to wipe it up, but we are pulling away.

I walk into the hotel and he is at the bar,
terra cotta man from a buried army,
but I cannot chip him.

I blink awake in an empty bed and my self
tiptoes to me side, begins feeding me pills.
Coaxes them down my throat like questions.

The windows are heavily lidded.
My skin shakes off in large, ashy flakes.

The sun is coming now, she says.
The sun is coming.

 

III. Neuro-hypnotism

Braid called it nervous sleep.
There is nothing nervous
about the planets fallen from their hoops,
placed on pegs in the room’s corners.

There is nothing nervous sleight of hand,
the coin slipped from pulse
point to palm of hand behind an ear.
The child smiles, believing the illusion.

There is nothing nervous
about trickery, or expectation of light
from stars which no longer aflame.

There is a place
in the mind like the arms of a tree
that knows it will never bear fruit.
This is what I look for—
branches reaching up unweighted,
thoughts in unfettered orbit.