By Abigail Marshall

Copyright thespinoff

A new poem by Abigail Marshall.

The children don’t know they are a diaspora from aortic rupture

Decompress under fluorescence. Blue woman. Agonal breathing. Ward. I’m washing out her urine jug and miss it. See her daughter’s face a hallway later. Come afternoon, collect my limbs. Flee yellow lights to reach the highway. Waikato River breeze. I park by low-slung bridges. Earphones. Walk. Not being raped, this afternoon. Not greyed by flames or ticking smoke. Not bitten under buildings. No boots, come heavy to sludge me from a neonatal landing. Can’t feel ER rubble beneath my ribs. Used to think heaven was a huge box of a city with a golden lid. Now I know it is a turntabled plate in a Victoria Street restaurant. Had dinner, once, with a man who was smug about it. Talked of violence like academia. Righteousness like math. As if he hadn’t grown on the meat of his mother. As if the blue woman’s body gave out because her heart wasn’t in it. At dinner, we picked shellfish from our dumplings. Mused that ethical frameworks should be based on more than pain—but anyone who says that’s drunk no poison. Think of this, riverside. Sneakers crush a seedpod. Let the path lead me to sun-dunes between conifers and oaks. Forget, for a moment—the world has got no edges. Elsewhere, some woman. Her stomach cradles a roofing beam. Concaves. Chest hitches in a jagged breath formation. Her children, floors beneath, try bleating. They scramble for their ligaments. Catch their knees on cutlery and bread. Taste shadow shrapnel. While working on the ward, a nurse once told me: last thing we know is noise. Once it’s agonal, it isn’t really breathing. My afternoon walk ends. I drive back to the city. Picnic with the children that I love. We settle. Rugs down over dirt. Break hot chips with sparrows. Braid the parkland grasses. Recline where Kauri fell like punctured lungs in other days. Spill cordial. Make pink clay of the ground where, mealtimes ago, men locked futures of the past into a wooden house of prayers. Burned them in their bodies. In our time, we eat pieces of pies. One of the littlest ones gets stung by a bee, almost, but doesn’t. Our light is flickerless. This is heaven. The children stay alive and do not know it.

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