Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Table of Contents Hey You ................................................................................................................................. 4 A different sort of tired .......................................................................................................... 5 I’m being airlifted to the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital. ................................... 6 MRI ....................................................................................................................................... 7 Aphasia ................................................................................................................................. 8 Good Kitten ......................................................................................................................... 10 Shirley Ryan Ability Lab ....................................................................................................... 11 The Spider On the 12th Story Window of Shirley Ryan Ability Lab ......................................... 13 Waking Up .......................................................................................................................... 14 Every Twenty Minutes ......................................................................................................... 16 Can You Name Ten Animals?................................................................................................ 17 Arizona at night ................................................................................................................... 19 Agnosia ............................................................................................................................... 21 Physical Therapy .................................................................................................................. 22 September, 2005 / July, 2018 ............................................................................................... 23 Rules ................................................................................................................................... 24 Yesterday, in the lake .......................................................................................................... 25 Just Calling to Say Hi ............................................................................................................ 27
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
To my Mom and Dad. To my family. I love you all so much.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Hey You I lay in the bed. I lay in the bed. And breathe. I lay in the bed, breathe. In, out. I lay in the bed, breathe in and out. Trying to grip the words. The doctor’s words so slippery. My brother smells like antiseptic but also, the warm sweatshirt he’s worn for ten years, the one that touched the smoke of so many fires in the back-forest alcove he carved for himself. Sometimes he allowed me in— The trees strung with fairy lights connected by a cord to the house an acre away— He grabs the doctor’s words and pushes a paper towards me,
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Genevieve Marvin
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A different sort of tired picks me up with gentle arms— hot on my ears, breath’s shallow, stinks like freshly laundered sheets. Come With Me, It says. Once, I listened— embraced this tired, Its hairy arms, Its slow heartbeat thumping.
It stole my dreams and left a great blank spot on my brain. Now, sleepiness invades the moments I spend awake. But every so often I remember It. Repeat to myself: I Am Alright— the spell to make It go away. But It is not there. The tired returns in minutes or hours, wrecked with uneven breaths— I let myself fall.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
I’m being airlifted to the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital. A man with a static ginger beard— a voice like honey. Helicopter blades buzzing away above our heads, dark, different from the ginger beard. It has made words sound like cotton—like It has pulled a blanket over my head, suffocating my face and softened the noise When I really think, I can hear Ginger beard’s words “We’ve got you” The sweet nectar pulls me back, and I feel impossibly safe.
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Genevieve Marvin
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MRI Sounds much nicer when there’s blood flooding your brain, and I know that’s bad— but listen: they put giant headphones on me to dull the clack and beep and click click click I really couldn’t be bothered to hear it, the bips and whizzes and click clicklick click click And the warm hospital blanket, freshly laundered, wrapped around my toes so snug and click clickclickclick And I’m sleeping, somehow, with the buzz And whirr And click Click
Click
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Genevieve Marvin
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Aphasia Wait for the pauses between them
to
catch up
to
the
slowness of your
Brain. It makes you want to
scream.
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Genevieve Marvin
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It fills your eyes
with tears
Not remembering
what you know you know, you know
reading between them, seeing between them,
it’s been twenty minutes, and you don’t want to be
given the answer,
but now you’re visibly upset, so your Dad just tells you, it’s lines.
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Genevieve Marvin
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Good Kitten The cat’s well slept tawny eyes dreamed a gem green lizard blended into pueblo, a glossy brown exoskeleton a cockroach, skittering across the kitchen floor, and a raven taking flight, beating oddly giant black wings. But she blinks, beautiful loaf, domesticated.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Shirley Ryan Ability Lab Rain spatters the windows. When was the last time I laid in the grassy yard behind my mother’s house? Scratchy soft hay made welts on my skin, the sky grew darker, golder, more auburn still until it went blue. The sweet salty tangy smell of chicken noodle soup in the kitchen and my mom’s soft jazz music played all around the house— I could remember so clearly it might never have been a memory – unlike the dirty rain soaked city streets—but when I opened my eyes, I saw blue stained-glass walls along the Chicago River next to a physical therapist who was nearing her final days, and seemed somber? glad to have a patient she could just walk with – But that was South Beloit and this is Streeterville, Lake Michigan colors shining up at me every day, changed— sometimes light blue, robins eggs, but today dark blue, almost navy, churning and kicking up hundred-foot water walls like The Great Wave 11
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Waking Up
which lives just a mile from this room, but may as well live in that hay field of a backyard— The golden auburn scales of the fish that I watched sliding up against each other did not mind their space— I had to wear a belt around my soft middle the first time I walked and saw them, my cheeks felt hot and damp which the Therapist said was from the walk but which I knew was from the eyes that were not the fishes’ eyes looking up at me—
why are you here? In this artificial pond so far from everything?
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Genevieve Marvin
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The Spider On the 12th Story Window of Shirley Ryan Ability Lab I choose to weave my web up here up high to catch the bugs that fly,
but here you are.
You look so lonely and yet you are not alone. Someone is always there, giving you little pebbles to swallow or, putting a proboscis into the clear antennae on your forearm. Most of the time, the creatures I see are old, sagging, move slowly without deliberation. But there you are. Skin taut around two green eyes, dark shadows that once shifted over me, and you grimaced. But that’s okay. Everyone does. You don’t move much, but neither do I, until my web vibrates.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Waking Up I love the way water moves. I remember a dry July day. My cousin wiped hotdog crumbs and ketchup from his upper lip and dove belly first into the pool. I could breathe through my nose and heard the cheers of my family distant like a crowd on the radio. Ripples from his flop covered me and I sputtered out water and laughed. I remember the way the light moved across the ceiling of Dolphin Swim Club during backstrokes, my best friend running against the water trying to catch up. It was beautiful. Rippling. Like satin. The most beautiful gown. I remember the way the sky looked from beneath the surface of Vandalia Lake, charged and static. I can hear the ring of the whistle, barely. People run onto shore as lightning cracks. I remember also, the way my arms moved as if against water when I first woke up. Disoriented I struggled and splashed at nothing I couldn’t grab, no water there. I couldn’t Move, but there was no water there. I couldn’t breathe, But there was no water there or 14
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water anywhere. No water. No water. No water
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Genevieve Marvin
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Every Twenty Minutes in the dead of night, a nurse comes, and I want to kick myself – I can’t remember his name. He checks my vitals, fidgets with knobs, unkinks tubes, doses medicine, to the buzz and pressure of the ubiquitous cuff. He would say “I’m so sorry for waking you. Just need to check a few things. You can go back to sleep.” As if this was an inconvenience. And I would say “No, it’s fine, do what you need to do.” And I would go back to sleep, just in time for –
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Can You Name Ten Animals? The blue and clouds melt into Lake Michigan, only a tiny gap exists between where the water begins and the sky ends. On the sixteenth floor of Shirley Ryan with my Speech Therapist— dark ringlets of hair tied up with a cloth band, eyes dripping blue with youthful wrinkles— she is looking at me and expecting an answer. Is she sad for me? The small white dots of sailing boats amble along the creased black edge of the window. I tried to think of an answer at least two minutes ago, but she’s letting me struggle. Does she think I’m stupid? If I were better, that vast lake would name them— Rainbow Trout, Sunfish, Pike, Salmon, Walleye, Carp, Catfish, Bass. 17
Genevieve Marvin
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How must the fish feel under tons of water, if only they would look up and see it. “That’s alright, you’ve done so much good work today, that’s enough for us.”
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Arizona at night The moon and the stars are pricks of light against the sky, so unlike and yet the same as they were in Rockford Illinois. The golden sparks of campfire light up your brother. He built this just for the two of you. After a day of hiking and watching for scorpions and rattlesnakes, with scrapes on your knees and dust staining your clothes, there are a half dozen other people here. But you know that This fire is for the two of you. You know this. He’s staring up at the stars, just like you. The only person with skin like yours, and eyes like yours, and a kind smile that is so much like your father’s— he looks for a moment across the campfire he built 19
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for the two of you. And this could be your backyard and everything is the same with him, no worrying about your health, just you And him and the campfire he built for the two of you.
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Genevieve Marvin
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Agnosia The trees outside are impossibly tall, leaves shake in the hot august air, blurry. The sideview mirror contains an unrecognizable face, framed by limp brown hair. The discharge papers fall from skinny hairy thighs onto the floor of my dad’s blue car. Hands on thighs, long fingernails, dry dry dry dry skin— and I read the discharge papers slowly, again and again, touch my hand to my cheek.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Physical Therapy A bird never tires during the beats it must flap its wings to go from a small central Illinois town down to Mexico and yes, it stops briefly, because its black feathers have grown grey and molted away— by the time Mexico comes, the sun will have burned into its beady eyes great orange, red, and terribly bright yellow, massive blue skies, and the bird will, in a few short weeks fly back again.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
September, 2005 / July, 2018 Blades of grass rip the sky above my head, / the fluorescents blind my tired eyes, arms scratched & red, and hat pulled tightly over my head / so the ticks can’t burrow into my hay colored hair. Spiders scurry onto my toes, trying to find a safe burrow for their eggs / and when I go to brush them away, they are invisible / the field behind my mother’s house – resting between corn and soybeans, / goose-pimples its crop.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Rules Caffeine pushes blood through my veins, so quickly, my heart and arteries will rip and tear themselves apart. Or so I’ve been told. I order a mint tea mixed with something else, something that the sweet barista said was his favorite that I just had to try. I don’t linger. A moment passes as tea touches lips— sweet, warm, and It’s gone down my throat with the chamomile.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Yesterday, in the lake Someone brought up my stroke and how amazing it was that I recovered, and I sank further into the water, covering my mouth with the green mossy stuff. Figuring if I drowned myself I could get out of this, the dozen or so strangers that now knew something or thought they knew something about me. And one swam over to me, scooted, on her adult floaty, with hair done up and makeup on, and necklace sparkling in the hot sun and hugged me. And then, you, stranger, you said “I think it’s just amazing what you went through, and I’ve read lots of books About Near Death Experiences and I’m Just wondering if you saw God, or the light, or something holy” And what was I supposed to say. That one moment I was conscious, and thinking And the next I had a seizure and then Blackness Nothingness Possibly forever That that was comforting to me. That that was more comforting Then your idea of God. 25
Genevieve Marvin
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So I told you of the darkness and nothingness. I left out the part about God, for your sake, stranger. And you took a sip of your third White Claw And said You must not have had a Near Death Experience.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Just Calling to Say Hi Are you alright? has replaced Hello. the way mom keeps her phone on her at all times, now— It’s sad (not really) before, it would take four or five calls to hear her voice. She is far away in her dim office, with big comfy chairs in her room, which smells of laundry detergent and vanilla candles with the giant bed that has seven pillows, or maybe at the grocery store buying crackers and cheese. It will be there. If you call, she will answer. There are days when at emergency room, as a precaution, I have to call her and tell her No. 27
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And listen to her let out all of the breath that has ever been in her body.
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Genevieve Marvin
Waking Up
Acknowledgments First, I want to thank my professor Romayne Rubinas Dorsey for helping me bring this project into fruition. It would not have been half the project that it ended up being without your help. I want to thank all of the doctors and therapists at University of Alabama Birmingham hospital, Shirley Ryan Hospital and Rehab Center and Northwestern Hospital. I want to thank my Mother and Father for being there for me and guiding me through the process of recovery. I want to thank my entire family, Ben, Julia, Michelle, Jen, Dana, Payton, Samantha, Steve, Nick, Paulina, Shobha and George, both of my Grandpas and Colleen, Michael, and Chuck. Thank you to Garrett Goad for designing the cover. I would also like to thank Judith Brown and Bob Bledsoe and my fellow English Honors students. Finally, I want to thank you. I appreciate the attention and care that you are giving to this work.
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