By Jennifer Saunders
For years after my CT scans
I imagined my emboli
as mudslides clotting the river delta
of my lungs—the bronchial paths
splitting and branching
like a river system, like the Colorado
entering the Gulf of Mexico,
a fractal feathering outward
of ever-narrowing channels,
of little and littler waterways—
and my emboli muck
from shore to shore.
I thought of the emboli
that almost killed me
as driftwood clogging a sluice,
as silt accumulating at a river’s bend
until it oxbowed.
Sludge shallowing the port,
shapeless and stinking
of motor oil
and decomposing plants.
But when I read about the man
who coughed up
a six-inch blood clot intact
and shaped exactly like
the right bronchial tree,
I googled the pictures and o clots!
O dams! O blockage
and breakage and stoppage
I didn’t know that you were fragile
and filigreed, that you grew to glisten
like fans of red coral.
Didn’t know you were delicate
and detailed, graceful and gorgeous,
that you were so fearfully
and wonderfully made.
How could I have known
you would be awesome
and awful in that final moment
before the nurse injected
the thrombolytic and you
became blood again.
Jennifer Saunders is the author of Tumor Moon, winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (forthcoming from Concrete Wolf, 2025) and Self Portrait with Housewife, winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition (Tebot Bach, 2019). A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee, Jennifer’s work has appeared in Baltimore Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Jennifer lives in German-speaking Switzerland where she teaches skating in a hockey school.
