Malaise by B. Lynne Zika

This is what it’s like:
Your head’s in a New York bar
slinging poetry ’til dawn,
and on the walk home Nureyev accosts you on the bridge,
flinging his arms around you and calling you Rosamaria,
l’amour qui’il a perdu,
and you could let him lead you through the dark streets
to an opulent hotel with grimy sheets
and demand that room service find a bottle of absinthe—
1923, the price is no object—
and he slips the pearl buttons of his starched white shirt
into your coat pocket so that one by one
he bequeaths you the treasures of his body:
the angular collarbone,
the swell of pectoral,
the iron torso and violent tumble of hair
spilling downward below his navel,
and

instead

you are lying on a wooden plank
in a bunker, glass on the windows
broken a lifetime ago,
and every nuance of the board under your back
needles you
until awareness becomes discomfort
and discomfort, pain
so you roll to your side
hoping for a spot of relief
or at least the cessation of feeling
(you’d rather go numb)
and after an hour,
two,
four,
you’d rather be dead
because it has to be better
with the body gone,
and when the fates prove to be
taking their delight elsewhere
and will not transport you home
you begin to woo the pain,
converse with it,
tell it what pretty ribbons it has in its hair,
and if it slips away,
even for a moment,
you coax it back
because you cannot bear the disappointment
of thinking the respite could last,
and finally you pray for numbness again—
any kind,
from any source,
and on good days
you find it

and later

you ask your mind
to be content with the way things are,
because, after all,
the body has no agility
and only the mind can deliver
a thrilling circus performance in its sleep.

B. Lynne Zika’s photography, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary and consumer publications. 2022 publications include Delta Poetry Review, Backchannels, Poesy, Suburban Witchcraft, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. In addition to editing poetry and nonfiction, she worked as a closed-captioning editor for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Awards include: Pacificus Foundation Literary Award in short fiction, Little Sister Award and Moon Prize in poetry, and Viewbug 2020 and 2021Top Creator Awards in photography. Website: https://artsawry.com/.