\nI carry my dark down halls, fields\u2014
\nit is shut up in my bones\u2019 cold locker.
\nSomehow the days pass. I stand in a room
\nwith my broken light, among all these others
\ncarrying their dark, and yet I persist.
\nMy blood thrusts as it should down the corridors of veins.
\nEven without brightness the body asserts itself,
\nsopping up oxygen, flinging platelets,
\nthe heart\u2019s metered spasms keeping rhythm
\nin the shadow of the ribcage.
\nEven after great loss, brain tissue lifted out
\nor uterus removed, there are the stunning
\nresiliencies of flesh.\u00a0 Even after death,
\nfilaments stiffening into rigor, in a few days
\ncell walls give way and enzymes slip like moons
\ninto cytoplasm, freeing the ligaments.
\nIt took many years to realize
\nI could learn to see this as miracle\u2014
\nhow the body sometimes goes on
\ndespite everything.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/vice-versa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/evening-of-the-solstice.jpg\")
<\/a>Two of Me<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
Last night there were two of me\u2014
\none controlled the other.
\nIn a train station, one lay down in a puddle
\nwanting an end but the other saved it
\nsaying sit up, sit up. I wanted to keep
\ncommuters from moving my body.
\nI wanted to board a train that never came.
\nFor the most part I couldn\u2019t be bothered
\nwith me. But I fumed when I lay down
\nin ditches every time I turned my back.
\nIt was enough to animate one self each day\u2014
\nI resented my resolute surrender,
\nmy lack of agency, how like a drunk
\nI had to be cajoled and kept out of gutters.
\nEvery day I switched on two sets of limbs,
\ntwo sets of eyelids. I summoned double
\nthe will to eat, read the newspaper,
\ngo off to work. The other me kept
\nwanting to sleep, to curl in the car
\nof a train going west.
\nI can\u2019t say how this incensed me\u2014
\nafter all I had done for myself\u2014
\nhow, like a child, I needed so much.<\/p>\n
\n
Split When we hit the dune my liver split apart like a fault line. I was two, on an ATV with my father. We were in Monterey, the sand\u2019s white tracks like thread across canvas. After the crash, the chopper thrashing and thrashing the air with its twin blades, my cracked liver waited in … <\/p>\nKat Hayes<\/strong><\/span>\u2019s writing has appeared in journals such as Cimarron Review<\/em>, Ecotone<\/em>, and Nimrod <\/em>and was set to music at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.\u00a0 She earned an M.A. in creative writing from West Chester University and an M.F.A. from Rosemont College.\u00a0 She teaches writing at Eastern University and is mother to two spirited daughters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"