Even when I fainted on the dockside
I wanted to do it with grace –
a limp swan folding its wings among reeds.
I remembered my kin who long ago
sailed this way, all plunder and panic.
Who died here on this ragged edge of land.
I should do better, be grateful as prayer
to the weathered wood that receives
skin and flesh wrapped triple tight
around bones.
The view dissolved.
Too bad we’d a flight to catch. Men scooped me
into an ambulance. Face after face arrived,
asking for a number on a scale. My heart-beat
drowned in the salt-water pump, stuttered
to zero. My hand on death’s doorknob,
I saw the joker who’d welcome me
sooner or later, no matter how many drip-feeds
I tear from my arm. I shouted eleven
and put down your phone, then heard
what I’d missed for a morning: seagulls
thieving on the sidewalk outside,
beaks twisted open for fury, my rough kin
ceaseless in hunger, not a prisoner among them.
I wanted to do it with grace –
a limp swan folding its wings among reeds.
I remembered my kin who long ago
sailed this way, all plunder and panic.
Who died here on this ragged edge of land.
I should do better, be grateful as prayer
to the weathered wood that receives
skin and flesh wrapped triple tight
around bones.
The view dissolved.
Too bad we’d a flight to catch. Men scooped me
into an ambulance. Face after face arrived,
asking for a number on a scale. My heart-beat
drowned in the salt-water pump, stuttered
to zero. My hand on death’s doorknob,
I saw the joker who’d welcome me
sooner or later, no matter how many drip-feeds
I tear from my arm. I shouted eleven
and put down your phone, then heard
what I’d missed for a morning: seagulls
thieving on the sidewalk outside,
beaks twisted open for fury, my rough kin
ceaseless in hunger, not a prisoner among them.
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Elizabeth Loudon is a fiction writer and poet whose work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Trampset, Blue Mountain Review, Lily Poetry Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal, amongst others. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA from Cambridge University. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Baghdad, will be published by Hoopoe Fiction in May 2023 and is dedicated to all those forced to flee their homes. She writes about loss, post-colonial displacement, and motherhood.
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