by Kelly Bancroft
Faces emerged, vanished. A stuffed frog kept singing. The clock’s big hand stuttered one o’clock one o’clock one o’clock.
The confusion and overlap felt permanent.
Before S’s death he saw his dead friend standing at the foot of his bed. It was the morphine, they said. I believe he saw Heaven. Except: I don’t believe in heaven. Except: I do believe in the brain’s yen for Heaven.
Morphine conspires. It is the devil I fear but have never seen. Or maybe I have, its guise is so smooth.
Like taking a nap in the afternoon to find upon waking that the day has passed. Except it’s the same day and you don’t know where you are. This lasts all day. Except: “Day” has no meaning. “All” has no meaning.
You are both your body and not. Heart and winter coat. Whole and biopsied. Diagrammed and fully rendered. Morphine makes you forget this.
S. in his last moments said he knew what it all meant. I choose to believe this was not the morphine conspiracy.
I finally refused the morphine to end the day that had no ending. When I awoke, I was in Akron, not Heaven. The roses opened. The frog squatted in silence.
Kelly Bancroft’s poetry and prose have appeared in journals including Cortland Review, JMWW, Puerto del Sol, Whiskey Island and Time Magazine. She has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist grant and two Ragdale residency fellowships, and is completing her MFA in Creative Writing. She writes and teaches in Youngstown, Ohio.