Elaine Katz: Duplex • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Elly Katz
DUPLEX

dark is darker than I remember
was it a dream or a memory?

rescue me from these shadows on the undersurface of spiral threads
nude twists and turns mounting
dismounting that called off glowing ground to stack us
in wheelchairs beside waiting rooms, watchtowers of wistful
windows into dog walkers, kindergarteners
skipping stones in alleys, bankers armed with coffee and briefcases—
people doing what the living do

I call out for mom through the baby monitor at what we did
to deserve this undermined life

it all flows as water
a forest deep in the soil

I call out for my hippocampus to carpet is with was—
quick flurry of DNA in vials
I eyed you harvest pearly pink pancreases, livers, hearts keenly
pumping life outside pigs’ gloriously pliable open-eyed bodies
blooming duplexes of cells, blood, microbes
this stuff of us and other that makes us

how long can we rail against
this circumference of tendon and tissue?

helices of genomes
staircases to attics just above the problem of life

detached in front of my naked nervous system
all weak knees in men’s laboratory scrubs

water fills gills of my lungs
this flickering breath can’t be what I’m made of

how long can the body carry burlap sacks of pain
that make strangers of cinnamon sticks, mint mouthwash
my mom’s touch, my dad’s embroidered collar—
all that cradled this delicate duplex?

blue nuggets of sadness plaster my body
bald tenuous atoms pulled into a coalescence I can’t
but can’t not call my body

what we did to this Earth for the air to grow teeth, for the soil to scream
hearing out of me, for the pigs to be butchered in bearing witness to
knives of axioms

where is the gossamer curtain of safety?

details of the world gone sour, stale
rye bread on countertops from months expired

how to fist the plum of a welling eyeball
to polish each with my dad’s shoe varnish
to latch the breast of the world in its crisp translucency

how to strip succulent flesh from a drumstick with
my incipient molars so there’s nothing left
before this awful roomate named survivor
nothing but the clink of a fork on white china
so a shoal of blackbirds lubricates
dangerous loneliness
as sudden and sure as rain

so I can say though my nimbus tears
touch me, mom, touch all of me
because the fear got up and left
a childhood fever breaking, an ordinary pivot of weather
when we scurried from the classroom
dressed only in our soaked plaid
our green-light eyes, our hides of goosebumps
we let go of our legs when we each had a pair

we flutter inside ourselves
our bodies of birds whirling, getting away with almost—
almost killing our inebriated bodies behind wheels,
almost sliding out on black patches of ice,
almost eating water hemlock, almost losing to almost
as we tumble out
into duplexes of sound

it’s all stashed in my basement drawers next to
my brothers’ baseball trophies, deflated soccer balls
lithographs of my mom’s ancestors,
records of our brief stay

relics of that laboratory goggles-over-glasses life
this mending skin: proof I met what came my way

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).