Elena Rotzokou: Two Poems
ICU Waiting Room
/
The vinyl chair seals briefly
to the backs of my legs—
warm, then gone.
/
Behind the doors
machines stitch the air
with their narrow beeping—
a seam of sound
holding someone together.
/
My breath grows deliberate.
I taste paper and sugar
from the coffee cooling in my hand.
/
When the nurse says stable
the word drops into my stomach
like a coin into water—
a soundless plunge.
/
I press my palm to my sternum.
The heart flutters there—
small animal
against bone.
/
Antiseptic thins the air.
Light bleaches the walls
to a colour without season.
/
When my name is spoken
heat travels up my neck
as though a vein of brightness
has been opened beneath the skin.
/
My knees feel briefly uncertain,
as if standing on ice
that may remember it is water.
/
Inside my mouth
saliva thickens,
preparing to receive
whatever will enter it.
/
Late Summer, Smoke
/
By afternoon
the light turns amber
as if poured through glass.
/
The air rests on my chest,
sweet in the way fruit is sweet
just before it splits.
/
I breathe and feel it enter
a faint abrasion
along the hidden branches of the lungs.
/
Ash gathers invisibly—
in the hollow of my collarbone,
at the seam of my hairline,
between the fingers.
/
I rinse my mouth.
Water brightens briefly,
then dims.
/
Somewhere beyond sight
trees are opening in flame—
resin liquefying,
sap boiling beneath bark
like fever beneath skin.
/
I water the plant on my ledge.
Its leaves press cool and lucid
against my fingertips,
veins fine as eyelids.
/
By evening
my clothes hold the day’s breath.
/
When I lie down
my lungs feel newly aware of themselves—
two dark rooms
with windows that will not open.
/
The moon rises, bruised.
/
Inside my chest
a slow ache gathers
not sharp enough to name,
but present,
like heat moving through timber
long before it shows.
/
Elena Rotzokou is a writer based in New York City and a PhD candidate in English at Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in ONE ART and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Neologism. Her fiction is forthcoming in Gooseberry Pie Lit Mag, where she makes her prose debut.
