The Pain Reliever By Carrie Olivia Adams

Silence is the sound the knife makes

slitting the skin.

 

Can you identify my weakness,

a pricking sensation

and numbness in one limb?

 

Can you hold this tongue?

Tell me, what is the function

of meticulous courage.

 

You are the most yourself

when you are in the motion.

 

One can be quick and too quick.

I have a stomach too.

It gets hungry.

 

If I be of necessity

opportunity,

if there be the slightest chance of success,

why have a mind, if?

 

Does that scream in the night across the alley

beg an answer? Are we crowning

into the sludge of an injury and its repair?

 

An elephant is larger and stronger than a horse;

but it is not preferred as a beast of burden.

 

Strength is a wee umbrella

in the storm.

This the friction sound heard

in inspiration, expiration, or both.

 

For convenience of description,

blood is bright red and frothy.

 

Have you earned the privilege

of making mistakes?

 

There really is no sex in science.

 

The nomenclature lifts

delicate subjects up from the plane

in which language places them.

 

Man has more strength,

woman, more endurance.

 

The hands and the instruments

are the chief sources of danger.

 

This fever.

 

There is no subject on which so much has been written

                                                                             and so little known.