Featured Poem: Gadolinium (Gd) by Christian Gullette

 

GADOLINIUM (Gd)

 

Christian Gullette

 

 

Intravenous ions,

metallic complex for the MRI scan, 

 

                              I watch his body become an interstate 

                                                          of dye-drenched veins, 

 

contrast agent tracing

             the melanoma gripping the back of his eye.

 

                            Whatever privacies there are in this body, 

 

they are different than what he arrived with, 

 

                                          a body happening 

                                                   as I watch it, 

 

              microscopic spaces 

                          now paramagnetic, 

 

coursing with gadolinium, one of the rare-earths

 

                                          though I’m barely acquainted with the world

                                                        blurring before me.

 

I pretend to understand these scans.

                                         His brain looks like water 

                                                                    after rinsing a brush

 

                      or a night view from space,

                                                  the planet’s cities 

 

phosphorescing grids

              where darkness adheres to the edges.

 

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Christian Gullette’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Smartish Pace, Western Humanities Review, Meridian, and other journals. He was a finalist for the 2019 Orison Books Poetry Prize, the Iowa Review Poetry Award and a semi-finalist for the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and the 2019 Verse / Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of the Cortland Review. Christian recently received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently a lecturer in translation theory and Scandinavian literature.