Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, Emory Neurological ICU All your life you think luck happens to someone else, and then one morning you wake with the odds stacked near the IV stand, and a man with dice for eyes comes in and flips a coin—heads you die, tails you live. The nickel clatters to the floor, and you both look down at Monticello, luck’s home. After, you lie alone with the clock and your one-in-four chance of coming out of this with your faculties as neat as the stitches in your crotch. You drift thirty-five years back to that trip where you stuck your hand in Jefferson’s dumbwaiter that carried wine from the cellar. You can hear the creaking of the pulleys as a bottle rises then you grab the glass by its neck so it hangs in the air like a falcon just before it gathers its wings to dive: how will you live now?
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, River Styx, Stoneboat, Terminus Interim, The Cortland Review, Vallum, and others.
