Three Poems By Lindsey Schaffer

Jim Evans, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Bruise

The IV is not a needle, the nurse tells me,

It is just a tube. Gateway

or foreign entrance. Saline flush— 

ocean

in my mouth. My arm feels puffy—

a distorted turtle.

A purple alligator or dissected heart.

I am never seated next

to the window. I suspect that is where the chemo

 patients go. My infusion machine screams like an orangutan.

Sun

sets and leaves its bruise on the rubber floor.

The Beginning of Forever

I cried when my mom said I would need glasses forever, when the girl chipped her tooth on a beer bottle in college. The OT told me I don’t know why this isn’t working. Some people have pains that won’t go away. My counselor tells me that this is a part of me now. Like a diagnosis or scar, things aren’t washed away as easily as they once were. I make water coloring part of my nightly routine. I pencil in permanence with a clenched fist. 

Sackler Wing

In the renovation, they shrunk the Sackler name,

tucked it above the gallery entrance just high enough

to be missed by those who weren’t looking.

Ink bleeds from the letters, but docents scrub it away. Below,

protesters finish their “die in,''  watch their fliers get swept

beneath the statue of a woman: she remarks

how clean the gallery is, how creamy. 

The walls maintain

neutrality. The didactics exalt objects that were

discovered, abandoned, acquired. I think of Helen—

how she never asked to start a war.

How lovely things, once prized for their beauty,

justify blood.

About the Author

Lindsey Schaffer is the author of City of Contradiction (Selcouth Station) and Witch City (dancing girl press). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Minnesota Review, Superstition Review, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and elsewhere. Lindsey has received scholarships and fellowships from the Indiana Writers Workshop, AWP, the City of Bloomington, and the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. She serves as a poetry editor for Variant Literature.