We’re excited to announce that The White Review Poet’s Prize 2022 is now open for entries. The Poet’s Prize is run in partnership with CHEERIO, and is for...
minutes were different in ward-time continuous difluoromethane and
stale skin and sterilising fluid from the ventilation units replaced
sundials the electric pulmonary system laughed at dressing-gown-
outpatients waiting for cups of blood and honey and metastasised
papyrus from a heart ventricle dazed and limp 400 feet above the aerials
on the hospital roof they washed and talked to the body before draining
and re-filling with formaldehyde and other solvents and then ushered
into a hermetically sealed coffin or ziploc sandwich bag I climbed past
the 17th hospital floor with my mother the day after a woman in a
brocaded suit got down on two knees and whispered about our seven
great matriarchs from a Romani family a knock on the door of each
sister when another one died we both listened to the flux of
compressed air up the lift shaft and the breath caught best by the
radiation suite on floor 20 and level LG before the morgue the stairs
changed from linoleum to concrete and I tripped over stacked
wheelchairs and filing trolleys head pressed against the mirror in the
lift for an overdue inheritance of glass divination or splayed-hand-
palmistry I was born in the Jessop Wing and watched it being
demolished while I passed on the school bus ten years later they
struggled to take blood and smiled at never making it to heroin with
that circulatory system while my grandmother’s cyanotype roots
hummed with warfarin sometimes I used the toilet by the hospital
chapel after leaving school and walked corridor to corridor not another
doctor for miles between here and 1979 time dilated between IV lines
and ventilator drops and bedside alarms and wind pulled through
structural cavities we did not know what the family name had been
before the air on the roof became anti-septic
I know you can see through my body, its soft little bones its heart-shrill rhythm. I forget how...
we pass through a series of moral systems –
the accumulations of good acts, the weighing
of bad, we note cicatrices of consequence
for as many as twenty generations after,
we count the number of words spoken and
how many were wrong The function of moral
systems differ according to era: historical
relativism rewrites the language of accounting
Some ghosts may choose to visit facsimiles
of dead ancestors and punish them eternally,
leaving them raped and blood-bound, but
we must remember this is an unmoderated
activity: there are over five billion cases
pending appeal; accounting might have
the raw data but they lack the resources
to form conclusions I have been
counted, meted; upside down I do not
move the water, the water moves me
