Self-Portrait with Beach Ball

Sometimes she seems like another girl, lying 
in the paper gown with her ass hanging out 
and her legs in the stirrups.  

In my first-person memory, I’m nothing 
but head, no body, eyes struggling to focus
on the haphazard job someone has done

taping a cut-out magazine picture to the ceiling: 
beach ball, two palms, flat lip
of the ocean. Not square to the table, 

I imagine someone short like me 
must have hung it, standing on her toes 
with the tape-bits hanging off her fingers

like hangnails or wings.  Her feet 
where my head is. It wasn’t a big thing, 
my wondering now is more thought 

than she put in to it, quick diagonal taping 
at each corner, then onward.  
Here, there’s always another girl 

who needs something. And who here 
would speak up to say the picture is crooked? 
Who here can speak?

After the Fentanyl I wanted to crack jokes
but I couldn’t stop crying.  The nurse said
I could look at the sonogram but her eyes

told me not to.  The greased microphone 
of the instrument gave voice to nothing,
and the doctor spoke in a murmur

and there was no wail or crescendo
as  ____ slipped out of me, 
I felt slippery as plastic. After,

I sipped juice from a paper cup
and bled onto a thick wad of cotton
and I was no longer outside, looking in

at myself. I was once again stuck
in my body, my body alone and lonely,
at the end of one thing, 

and the start of something else. 

REBECCA BORNSTEIN

Rebecca Bornstein is a poet and worker who’s held many jobs—including production cook, elementary school secretary, and creative writing instructor. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship and the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Anne LaBastille Memorial Writing Residency. Her poetry has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Rogue Agent, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, and The Journal, among other publications.