anastomosis
by Hedyeh Elahinia
Ali Qapu Music Hall, Isfahan. Image source: Feng Wei Photography
iv.
cavernous
are the air-pockets inside a human skull. you might not know
unless you’ve touched their insides:
gloves on bone. how sorry can a person be?
what can fill the hollow of these ornate
bone-cellars? can grief? can love?
v.
in the land that formed my blood are
ancient music halls: ceilings
with carved-out honeycombed
lute-shaped niches, scarlet
sinusoid spaces for sitars, for
weeping vocal cords to fill
with song. for liquid music to enter
and ring and build and pulse and
swell and dive under flesh ineffable,
filling aching cupulas with ink,
dyeing tiny ear-bones in its wake.
vi. is it really so inconceivable, then,
not to have different words for
grieving and loving?
the blues that bleed into reds?
vii.
in the neck of the woman we sliced open cold on a metal table was
an arterial anomaly: one vessel,
split gentle, in two unexpected threads:
i.
often i see my pulse in places that
surprise me, like
the inside of my ankle or
the fabric of my shirt-front or
enfolded in a late-summer dream:
pulsing seas, their unbounded
navy-toned safety.
the ghost of friendships past.
the dead. old houses. longing
laminar shadows.
the color of aging,
dyed jugular blue.
ii.
now we mourn in black,
but my ancestors grieved in
venous, wine-dark blues.
often when feverish,
i dream of the old-bazaar dyer
between my grandmothers’ homes,
baptizing bare strings
for the bereaved, for book-covers,
for weaving into red-blue rugs.
what would it be like to dye
so fully the strings that, gently, encircle me,
the color of god? and
whose color is more excellent?
whose baptism? whose dyeing, more true?
iii.
the ancient texts
did not have separate words for dark red
and dark blue. i too
sit, anastomotic, where blood changes hue.
what mysteries, trapped pulselong,
are freed only in the dead?
what room between capillaries
for memory, red?
Hedyeh Elahinia is a third-year medical student at the UTCOMLS.
