“Vault”

By Carla Gadula, 1st Place, Poetry

Interoception

at the precipice of the unravelling

where every speck of illuminating dust

that i feel

belongs inside of me

I will, with steel of bone and rage

to remain uninvaded.

On a day of speckled sun

so ordinary in scope

I sipped my bitter coffee

awaiting him.

He had graceful fingers and

a clever decrescendo

that allowed him to

reach inside and scatter me

into pieces.

A surgeon with raven wings,

he told me on that

gray lemon stained morning

that my body had betrayed me.

He used the arid sighs

of a scientist to shake me

but what my eyes heard

what my cavernous mind tasted

was the cells colliding like chimes

and them synchronizing inside

like a catalyst avalanche.

You have cancer, he said

with clipped vigilance and a starched

maroon checked button down

threading the surgical pathway

into my jittery colt running limbs.

a cascade of grasps happened then

and all my every sense

pressed up and flexed like fire

oscillating me, spiralling.

All my life I have been told

that I flitter

full of revery and labradorite sighs

whimsical laughter and a poet’s

extraterrestrial gazes.

But the other side of me

the Jungian scorpionic vault

has a steel sawed casing

surround,

an unrelenting need for control.

And the body has a pointed edge

I willed it into submission

many times

with sinewy lines,

a collarbone jutting

a shoulder that never heaved

nor tensed

a cage that kept my secrets.

It was a separate entity

vast, still, away.

But here in a fluorescent room

with blasts of light upon my skin

the surgeon, he implored me.

Interoception.

I felt my blood soar mad

I felt my heart stagger into awake

I felt my breast against my bone

where a conspiring army

had strengthened their hold

I felt a wound in my mind then

because my cage

with the swirling of

screaming dust particles

would have to relent

to the knife that cuts me

as I lay

arms splayed outwards

wrists restrained in leather

carving out the betraying seed

and then the nodes

that would light up a sprouted vine

cresting my fate,

and after,

I would have to relent

to the nucleus tunnel

one of synergistic beacons

they will laser into the heart of my cells

and crack them all open

terrifying shadow missionaries

a healing potion of

5 million milirems

of radiated beams.

relent

to the invasion

of being saved.

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