maggie wolff
Waiting Room Waiting
They will ask if the medicine is doing the right thing.
I practice an answer
inside the studio apartment of my head. Buildings
and bodies have bones,
but that doesn’t mean I’ve learned how to live
inside either space. The world
shakes from hemisphere to hip,
birds fluttering an exhale of wings, a symphony
rising against static. I drown it out,
look at the waiting room light fixtures.
How much waiting has been made worse
by the wrong lamp color temperature?
The white-hot lighting carves a face
into a sharp-edged map display. A dimmer bulb
is a dangerous reminder
of how easily a certain kind of sadness kills.
Yellow light liquid-slides through ear canals and eye blinks,
filament-filling the skull with electric
whispers vibrating currents. The skull
is a set of walls. Walls hold a building up,
but my head is something heavy I carry
from bed to work to dinner to darkness, thoughtless
as a roof. A building’s only job is to stay,
and I remind myself the same is true for a human life.
One door leads to a hallway, a hallway to another door
where they tell me your blood pressure is a canyon,
always too high or low. The pills
weigh me down like concrete stairs.
I tell them the body is a building,
and I am not good at living here yet.
Hum Hunger
open throated
open waters
gulf of throat
scraped gulf shelf
shelf swept bare in the basement
of the wild-wandering-waking root cellar
rooted in cells
timbered trunk of body branches for limbs
branched
by branched ripples rattle the window low hum
water heater sings a fight-freeze song slipping
ripples under the hum
singing at my skin seams and electric
throating snails
their shells line my stomach
tectonic plates ripple and hum buried
inside the roots of the body
Maggie Wolff is a proudly queer poet, essayist, occasional fiction writer, and first-year Ph.D. candidate at Illinois State University. She recently won an AWP Intro Journals Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications.