reparations I’ll pay piecemeal until death

by Elly Katz

I converse with

nobody all the time,

a liminal voice singing.

But I write to complete

discourse between lines.

I owe them that –

for stepping up

when life stood me up,

for proving the palpability

of dusk,

of spaces in

between,

that wholeness can be harvested  

out of breaking,

that earnest beauty beats in the ear,

not in the eye,

for being abiding open lines that

never end even when

syntax says they do.

At 27, verging toward a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went to a doctor for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Upon waking from anesthesia, she searched in vain for the right half of her body. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. Her path toward science, amongst other ambitions, came to a halt. As a devout writer, she feared that poetry, too, fell outside what was possible given her inert right fingers. However, in the wake of tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor.