Eloise Klein Healy: California Poets Part 3, Three Poems

Eloise Klein Healy

June 25th, 2021

California Poets: Part III

Eloise Klein Healy

Three Poems

Down Using my right hand, I point, “I can draw it.” I draw “Eloise,” but really, it’s the opposite angle. As happy as I am showing my word backwards, my point doesn’t work. Missing again.

First I Wrote About Aphasia Now I’m adding coronavirus since this is fuckin’ scary. So, I say then, get in gear, bend and stretch. Take a deep breath. Coronavirus is what it knows just about itself, a red eye snatching and attaching, weaving and cranking with whispers. I think I might even die now, too, but just for the heck of it it’s easy for me to think about me. “Say no words,” the virus says. The silent weave, the virus spends grabbing right next to anybody. Yet I mean no death to me. I mean surviving and that’s what I want All I can be.

Gone I lost my language so quickly no real words could even assist me. I couldn’t speak my meanings, my mouth without my mind and it was just yesterday when I was 72.

Author Bio:

Eloise Klein Healy has published numerous collections of poetry, including A Wild Surmise: New and Collected Poems and Recordings (2013); Ordinary Wisdom (2005); The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (2007); Passing (2002), a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize; and Artemis in Echo Park (1991), which was also nominated for the Lambda Book Award.