V E R S E and I M A G E

Today I heard a man talk to his mother about her eulogy.

They decided on the color of her funeral flowers –

Purple, and white

He kept reminding her to swallow her water

And finished his sentences with “mama,”

So she would remember she was supposed to be listening.

I watched a woman brush the oily hair from her husband’s forehead

She spoke like velvet,

Telling him how good he looked

With that tube sticking out of his mouth,

Sitting up today!

There is Arabic music playing down the hall

Because a patriarch is dying

Zaeem, Omar Almadani

Allah ateyk alf afyeeh

The family told the doctors they were so thankful for them.

The dead tell stories

They forget to swallow

They sign papers

That say they would like to die soon

They listen to music

They pick flowers

They have tubes in their mouths, in their arms, in their bellies,

They laugh and laugh and laugh

from The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023

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Mostly I dream about being lost. What is this place that seems so dangerously familiar and yet maddeningly strange? How do I get to where I’m going, and just what exactly might that place even be? And how do I, desperate, find what I need among all this that crowds in to thwart me, this collation that confuses and obscures my seeking?

Last night I walked through a dim building with stairways and many rooms. I was among people I knew: we were a family or a community or somehow connected. As I encountered one person, then another, they all seemed frightened. We knelt together, one by one. I reached to put my arm around each and said, “We will save the world.” Tears in our eyes. “And this is how we will do it.” But I woke suddenly in the dark with no answers.

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This afternoon I read Maya Sorini’s new book, The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den. A lot of poetry is about pain. This book is pain. Read it and you will succumb. Enter these poems and they may infect your dreams with Sorini’s refrain: Nobody could / help me.

During the 40 years I practiced medicine the concept of pain steadily evolved. Not only the neuroanatomical patterns of pain and bioneural origin of pain, but new ideas emerged about the nature of pain, this sensation that we all experience but which is impossible to communicate, impossible to share. Pain has become the fifth vital sign (after pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temp); every time I take my parents to their doctor, the nurse dutifully asks if they are having any pain. Medical practice has attempted to clinically quantify pain with the ubiquitous one-to-ten scale and its familiar smiley faces and frowny faces. The compulsion by doctors to relieve pain (and perhaps the expectation by patients that it will be relieved) is a factor in our national epidemic of opioid addiction.

But Maya Sorini’s poems are more than the pain of wounds and fractures. They include but exceed the pain of the death of a loved one, the pain of tragedy and grief. As I read these poems, I learned an odd and non-intuitive physics of pain. Clearly we all cope with pain by pushing it away – like gravity, pain’s effect on us diminishes in proportion to the inverse square of distance or some such. Also pain within a certain minimal radius of proximity can be willed into submission: my migraine, my surgical incision, my grief I can encapsulate in denial or repression and with clenched jaw march on.

But there is a certain critical distance, or rather closeness, of pain that lacerates unrelentingly – the pain of experiencing the pain of another. Maya Sorini wrote these poems from her months of clinical research in a trauma surgery unit at Washington University in St. Louis, standing in emergency rooms and operating suites as blood dripped into her shoes. Perhaps bullets never penetrated her anatomy, but shards of violent metal tore her. Wounded her. It is painful, yes very painful, to share her distress. Is there any hope for healing from these dreams of flight and helplessness? Can Daniel, gradually succumbing to the carnage of the lion’s den until he himself becomes little more than a boneheap, ever rise up again? Can any of us be saved?

When I finished the final page of Boneheap, I sat for a time in silence. In shock? I wanted to push away the pain but I had read every single word and they would not be denied. Now what? Perhaps I’m awakening from a dream in which answers flit through my fingers like moths then dissolve into mist with the rising day. Perhaps a dream is some subconscious nudge not to give up looking for answers. Is it a tautology to pronounce that pain must be felt before it can be unfelt? Isn’t unfelt actually the precise opposite of what the dream impels us to seek?

Maya Sorini, what I’ve felt in reading your words is pain which we have now, after all, shared. In sharing with this reader, may the burden of your pain be lightened.

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Say what you mean

Stop saying “expired”

Like it is inevitable for the 28-year-old

To die on a Tuesday at noon.

Stop keeping it a few words away from you,

Using “expired” because “death” forces

you to think about

Your grandfather’s funeral

When you were 16 and had never seen

Your dad cry before.

Say what you mean exactly –

Do not say, “we did everything we could”

When what you mean is

“I have given every tear and deep breath I have to this job

But the bullets keep winning.

I don’t want to be

The one telling you

That we lose every

Day to scraps of metal.”

Say what you really mean:

“Your son is dead.”

from The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023

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This morning a robin collides with the glass windows of our sunroom. It flies into three panes, then four, then the same one many times, looking for different skies, trying to escape the day. With each thump I think, “this is the sort of thing poets write about, those poets who know how to hide the word death inside of a songbird,” but I don’t know how to talk about blood without speaking the scarlet spatter of it. I say nothing to the red-brown bird, the reflection of the sky’s blue face veined with branches, the feathers so light they seem to shirk the responsibility of falling, the dull thunk ringing in the house, the morning so quiet it becomes prayer, the lined triangle of yellow beak, the black moon of the eye intent on its mirage. I cannot write that poem. I am still thinking about blood. When I see the robin throw itself at the window a fifth, sixth, seventh time, I open the door, I wave my arms, I chase it away.

from The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023

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Maya J. Sorini is a poet, performer, and medical student from Rockville, Maryland. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis while engaging in clinical trauma surgery research. Since 2005, Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina has been finding and sharing remarkable voices through collections of poetry and short fiction. The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den is the winner of the 2023 Press 53 Award for Poetry, selected by Tom Lombardo.

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