Julia Simoniello, Parasitic Thoughts, 2018
Ballpoint pen, gouache, and watercolor
How cold this room, how baby blue
the sheets as I shiver myself to sleep.
I want to remember
what it was like: face-down:
scalpels, forceps, hands,
intruding on a dream,
saws, clamps, breaking in
to bone, the white theatre.
A hole in me, how cold
the clamp, how taut the skin.
Sing, sing bone-saw, open
the passage my thoughts walk,
the frosted back-alleys
of the brain, the seedy
side-streets with plastic bag
tumbleweeds, an anesthesia dream.
Godly cinematographer,
get that dolly shot
in the subway, show a rat
trekking a slice of pizza down
the tracks. This is where
one goes when the lights go
out, when sterile gloves tread
deep in the soul, this is where
the metronome of the mind is.
Then a waking, soft and slow
like walking in the corridor
between two lives. The lights dim.
A projector flickers and I see how
the bone saw let the light pour in—
sawdust, stardust, thought rust.
I see the surgeon’s hands
and the paper moth
which he pulls from my skull.