Jeffrey Calhoun
About the Author
My writing credits include 2River, elimae, Softblow, Blood Orange Review, Stirring, and Triplopia. I was nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart anthologies for poems in 2007.
For more information, email Jeffrey Calhoun
Love, or how lithium changed my life
for John Updike
Dearest reader, most of my cells
are no longer suspended in fluid, replaced
as if by a miracle, a heavy injection of love.
A doctor inspects the wiring of my soul
to see if it is ordered, properly grounded.
My wife balances on the point of a white pyramid,
screams as I mumble about August rains
and deadly science. I sit on a concrete throne
like a misanthrope god, dismissing
the possibility of a love phenomenon.
I smile at her fingerprint whorls,
the rose wilting adjacent to her ribcage.
She asks about beauty,
but all I can think of are onions,
attractive and sitting forever in a still life.
It is that I have become indifferent to her
nakedness, the lack of anything exotic
which is immutable, unlike cabbage.
What remains is to repair chemistry,
the balance of neurotransmitters in my brain.
She becomes a lithium mirage
against streets plated with cheap gold.
