Euphoria
by Janis Greve
Yes, I am getting better now
after months of uncertainty,
my lungs, or rather the spaces
around them, filling with fluid.
I’d have them drained
and they’d fill right back up,
making it hard to breathe.
They wouldn’t stop,
and I imagined them
sobbing, a fit of hysterical heaving
that no amount of shushing
could rock away,
no country grandma
like my own so long ago,
the eddying dough of her arms.
Now the shots are working
and week by week
my lungs cry less.
They are finally settling down,
and everyone—
my doctors, my husband—
is pleased, except me,
who had gotten used to
the needle and catheter,
the dutiful warnings about risks
that accompany any procedure,
the awkward posture as I hunched
over the small, shifting table before me
and the doctor extracted the amber ale
no one would care to drink.
How could you, I want to say,
deprive me of this thing I never
asked for, but that gave me a strange
euphoria, a flood I could always count on
rising, silent, from the depths of me,
insisting on its right to appear,
doubly upset, unbalanced, unhinged,
so perfectly inconsolable.
Janis Greve is recently retired English professor. Her poems have appeared in such place as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Emerge Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, North American Poetry Review, The Florida Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other places.