Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Diagnosis as Horizon
Health is the illusion where sky meets the sea, the line you can find until you try to catch it. What is a horizon but the failure of hope achieved? What is the start of the void but the end of heaven? I am watching from the porthole of a ship already sinking. I am tossing valuables overboard to lighten this impossible load. Survival is the myth—men pierced by the beak of a giant glass-eyed squid pulsing purple as the night or the cruel siren’s shriek, death disguised as desire like all good things. What does it mean to want an ocean already surrounded? Why refuse land when safety was never guaranteed? I have slopped tar to stop the hull rot and bleed, stitched my pale flesh to a mast’s windless sail. Sometimes I imagine myself stripped bare breasted to the boat front streaming but it is only my jagged reflection staring up from the water, mouth open and screaming. I sail toward the unattainable, pretending there is a choice between Charybdis and Scylla sea-scrolled on the ancient cartographer’s map. If I am lucky, I will simply fall over the edge of the world.
Child’s Play
Operation taught us bodies were an experiment for the healthy, any other game like hitting approaching objects with a stick or fitting puzzles pieces together. But humans were imperfect, Cavity Sam an unwell man with a dozen hurts—broken heart, wrenched ankle, funny bone, even an abnormal wish bone—pain’s incessant buzz contagious if we did not tend to his wounds well. Medicine was entering a body long enough to empty it out, simply remove the broken bits to toss onto the table before collecting proper payment. How we shouted when Sam’s pain became our own, cursed his illness for ruining the fun. How our goal was always to shut him up.
Pearl
Pain cracks me open like an oyster, pries what I tried to hide, soft brine and tender pulse wet as a woman splayed on a couch for fainting, fragrant with medicine’s insistence that she is fine, hurt—then, as now—spectacle to swallow with a dash of heat or the bright burst of lemon before discarding the weak rind. Core hurt from a chronic body, shuck the shell of a woman hoping to hear the ocean but finding only the sound of her own disabled heartbeat, allowing herself to be easily swallowed. All I can offer is the hard husk shaped like a butterfly desperate to escape, an empty pelvis, a spinal scan revealing no reason. There is no pearl here—I could not hold the hurt inside well enough, pain only a prize for someone else to warm to shine, to dangle from a satisfied throat.
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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. Nerve, a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice, is forthcoming with Sundress Publications, and Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University.