Our fifth 'Poem of the Week' is 'Neuroward2East' by Jacinta Le Plastrier. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Jacinta who discusses and reads her poem.

 Neuroward2East

You go back or forward or simply out,

past a self's meniscus.

You have been where we have not.

What do you return

from death's tenderness?

For days you stay only as breath

bonily, the leanest part,

shuttered behind the saw,

precise of the surgeon.

His hands at your skull

juggle the entrails

of all memory, fretting your life

for hours, a newborn thing

which nearly leaps

to break the thinnest rope

by which you span your spaces.

I sense you watch everything,

from in there, counting

across your palms still human,

days interleaving wrongly

with other days, the day

your brilliant blood flooded—

that which you adore,

what you would cast behind.

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor, and publisher. See: www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com