Amy Suzanne Parker

COVID Poem, or “Just Stay Alive”

Amy Suzanne Parker

I.

First, I became liquid sloshing in a toilet bowl. My once-hibiscus-pink lips bloomed blue. I convulsed with cold, smothered myself in blankets. At the walk-in, a fever christened me at 102 degrees. My pulse was 150— my heart is a drunk hummingbird. In the ambulance, the paramedic gave me two doses of medicine to slow it down to 125. I felt it flutter, try to fly out of the cage of my chest. II. How do you stop your body from killing itself? Years of self-abuse and COVID raise the levels of my liver enzymes. Mom died of liver failure. I am afraid and only 35. She was 67. They said it was the Tylenol, not the psych meds. The way she popped them like PEZ for her headaches. The doctors assure me that I am recovering and leave my bodily functions unexplained. I forbid myself from doing the math— it’s how I sleep at night. That and the Trazodone. I wear her ring. It’s starting to slide off my finger. I turned into her, inheriting her body all over again. My abdomen inflates with ascites. I look eight months pregnant, she said, toward the end. I’ve never been pregnant, only with myself. I was an April baby, but Easter always arrives too soon. I can’t help but resurrect, like my grandpa did at 67 after his cirrhosis. It’s what my body does, regenerate, a starfish.

III.

In the hospital, a nurse needled me in the arm. My blood spilled onto the bedsheet, forming a heart. My IV bruises are storm clouds. With my mask on, my breath fogs my glasses, and COVID fogs my brain. It’s snowing outside, and the heat inside mists up the windows. I could write a poem on glass. It’s another grayscale day in Binghamton, and I’m dying again with the seasons. My body absorbs the grayness, tires easily. Winter is a leech sucking and suckling, depending on its hunger. It wasn’t always this way. IV. Persephone knows the distance between a sun and a star. Maps of space turn black into white. If I know heaven, it burns like potassium in an IV. They tell me to eat bananas. An apple a day, they say. But for the queen of Hell, the world is too congested for pomegranates. The seeds stick in her teeth long after she bites. A goddess cannot subsist on fruit alone. V. How do you slow your heart when it’s always fighting? There’s a song with my name on it whose refrain is “just stay alive.” This weather scarred me, and my body wants revenge on itself. When I first learned about homeostasis in my mother’s nursing textbooks, I laughed. Isn’t the body always under attack? If Disney World taught me anything…

I try to go home, return to equilibrium. Now, the green in Florida shocks me every time I visit, that things can still stay alive in December.

Lithium is for Lovers

Amy Suzanne Parker

I’ve been there, got a t-shirt. I decorate my apartment with empty orange bottles. I am tempted to fill them with wax, make them candles, a shrine to all the meds I’ve loved before. Some facial deformity says I’m from there. Is it my crooked teeth, my chicken pox scar? The slight twitch of tardive dyskinesia when I smile. One of my eyes is smaller than the other. Yesterday I realized it has been twenty years, measured in yellowed linoleum, dusty diaries, the forecasts of old CVS receipts. Can you read the abuse somewhere on my face? The psychic I saw last January said in a year’s time I’d have a baby boy; my mom would be okay. But she got the abuse right. I paid her eighty dollars, and my boots crunched in the snow. I drove off, fearing the worst. I measured the year in pills and blood tests. Shades of pink and creamsicle have passed through my mouth, a place of worship. My body is a temple smashed, looted. Shards of stained glass splinter my thoughts. I’m a bloody tongue with a busted tooth. A root canal, a crown, a filling. I am building an empire of enamel. I close my mouth to smile. If you want to know how I feel, take too much and live. You’ll see where I’ve been.

Amy Suzanne Parker is a PhD candidate at Binghamton University in New York, where she studies English and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Juked, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, Burrow Press Review. Originally from the Tampa Bay Area, she loves a good storm.