When I Say I’ve Felt Alive I Mean
a kind of knowledge, the way a current disrupts dead water. An animate child, I was once electrocuted, my hands damp around the lamp’s black cord. Understood everything by its opposite or else its antecedent, the many versions of my brother— in health and aboard the gurney rolling down a sterile hall, blue as the swell of tidal lurch. The machine’s hum, electric pulse charting his narrow boat. The brackish pull that sends the little cups and bright debris out and back and out again.