Editor's note: these poems were originally featured in the old/previous Luna Luna. They originally appeared in “The Cardiologist’s Daughter,” published by Two Sylvias Press.
There Are Times When the Heart Stops and the Person Continues
This may sound simple but stop—
There is more than cell death, the subsequent shock for return
Put aside the yogis who may will their organs still
I am right here and you are somewhere in a room of eggs
And someone right now is stopping—I can feel the strong glaze.
Even this distance is nothing (when compared to matters of the heart)
There are ways in which we shutter
Another loved becomes obsolete, we no longer receive him
for undetermined or determined reasons he is no more
or no more present in a room of eggs than in a field
of windmills. We continue, our lungs breathe us
one inspiration after another but our hearts
stop. We present ourselves in Chemistry, conduct
experiments involving the sublimation of caffeine
watch the corresponding development of crystals—perfect
diminutive icicles—upon a cold finger.
We are not thinking about the process of respiration
but notice the chill of extraction.
My Feeling for Stab Lab is Like a Left to Right Shunt Progressing to a Right to Left Shunt, Something that Requires Attention Before Potential Cyanosis
i.
If I told you my first
was with a butterfly
that it took three
times, before I could
stick. The instructor
priming me with
What will it take?
and I couldn’t answer
to failure. But the flash
that followed, far
more electric than
anything I had ever—
a steady crimson
filling a tiger
top. The shock
of placing a 23
G with accuracy
the unexpected
heat of letting—
ii.
In this chapter, I discover
the key between precision
and accuracy. I am zero
for four and I skipped
a night of ferries (and you)
for hours upon
hours of precisely
missing the median
cubital, some lovely
part of a dorsal
venous network
that likes to shake
it to the left while
my anchor retreats.
I am reminded
this isn’t metaphor.
I follow anything
but an apparent aqua-
marine as I coin
the term invisi-
vein, retract my
needle and leave.
Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a naturopathic medical student. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in Verse, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. Her first poetry collection, The Cardiologist’s Daughter, was released by Two Sylvias Press in late 2014. More work and musings may be found at www.natashamoni.com