When Remembering I’m More Than What Wires into Forgetting

When naked with myself, I feel where a right elbow isn’t, then is. I let my left palm guide me through the exhibition of my body. I’ve never been here before, or so it seems, as I photocopy my snapshots into my draining database. This inventory of remembering only to forget hitches my breath, so I pause for it to resume resigning me to gaps where feeling lives unfelt. I probe for a hip crevice absent to present its coy self, to climb out of numbness. The search survives surrender, as a clavicle crops up from extinct soil. As I reach across the distance into forgetting, I redeem a shoulder at the expense of an elbow. Wholeness is a concept at a remove. I’m all compromise. As I lay on the ground, gravity grounds me through planks four stories beneath, down into the Earth— where I nullify my flesh in dirt, my bones commune with roots fracturing into multiple directions. Pain pulls me closed, and I curl into nothing dimensions— knotting knees into torso, pressing into wooden panels along edges of my free-diving body retreating from contact, from the knowledge that paths to unity abound and mine just happens to be through brokenness.

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went to a doctor for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Upon waking from anesthesia, she searched in vain for the right half of her body. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. Her path towards science, amongst other ambitions, came to a halt.

As a devout writer, she feared that poetry, too, fell outside what was possible given her inert right fingers. However, in the wake of tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor.