Emergency Rooms
SKYE TARSHIS
E.’s Ridgewood apartment has ants. With the end of my mechanical pencil
I kill five. I drop each one into a white serving bowl. Then, into the trash.
My uncle tunes a too-small guitar down to Drop D. Loosens, then tightens
the string until it snaps.
I don’t know yet that my friend is in love with me when we smoke weed in Central Park
out of a purpleclearquartz pipe. In front of her, I lose my vision, tiny buzzards in my legs.
Haphazard masturbation while watching the raindrops slide off the thick green leaves
after a long call with the specialist who might fix my mother.
On the other side of the curtain, a woman, at the foot of the bed of an old friend,
smiles at me, the beeps in the emergency room like sports buzzers.
SKYE TARSHIS is a poet from New York City. They have poems published or forthcoming in Pink Ochre Magazine and Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine, and their criticism appears in RHINO Reviews! and Lucky Jefferson. Skye works in publishing and lives in Brooklyn.
