Dawn Breaks with Nausea and Silver

THE WARD

a monthly feature

by Elisabeth Horan

Hello lovelies - welcome back to The Ward -

I have always felt trees - their cuts, their limbs, sap as blood, roots as toes...growth as my growth, loss as my loss.

Robert Kenter and I are working on a collection with his tree photos and my poetry. When I see his trees - I feel things.. pain, fear, love, loneliness -

I react. This poem and photo sang together in shimmering pain and anxiety the day of my surgery. And the trees and I felt all of it.

Love, Eli <3

Photo by Robert Frederic Kenter

Dawn Breaks with Nausea and Silver

by Elisabeth Horan

Vibrant sky - plays the music of grey

Of loss in one’s body, lines up organs

And metaphysical ovaries - don’t go

Together or say anything when they

Are snipped at the base root - no tether

Purple or green, clear blood in trees

Makes me so happy, for it isn’t red

Or comical, they way she vomited

From the Heparin, not for any reason

Except terror - thats vasovagal I know

Trees know this - when chainsaws, sabre

Toothed tigers, want to dance in the

Silver dawn - logger Rodney, ear muffs on

Surgeon Ivy, scrubs donned - and all we

Can do is lay there, felled and look up

At the sky - or vomit over the side of the

Hospital bed - kidney shaped receptacle

And the soft blanket of white snow

Which so gently receives the sliced

Corpses.