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.