Thrush Poetry Journal
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Michael Gould

Driving to St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota

From the top of the hill you can see the entire city. The blue-gray harbor   

of Lake Superior wrapped in a curtain of billowing fog. Wind-soaked sunlight 

leaking through the cloud deck the weatherman says is broken as I think of 

my little brother in his starchy white robe, spooning clumps of Cheerios 

into the body that will soon house an eighteen and a half ounce lobe 

of my lower left lung. I light a Newport and shift into neutral, coasting 

past the oil spatter of motels and twenty-four-hour convenience stores, 

the drift of chimney smoke rising from rooftops and diffusing into the air 

like a fraudulent alibi only very cheaply engineered. Three hours to the operation. 

Minutes dissolve like strands of burning hair. The surgeon will make a seven 

inch incision between my fourth and fifth ribs, will pry me open like a stubborn lily 

refusing in the springtime to bloom. Steam advances, now, up the windshield 

of my two-door Chevy, blurring the string of painted yellow lines into needles of  Novocain, 

thrusting their sharpened metal tongues into the clenched and trembling stomach muscles I will – 

God hold me to this – no longer employ as a vehicle for my fledging sense of self 

infatuation. I am nothing to desire. No prize to be won. From the exit ramp, I 

make a left on Michigan Street – the same road we would take on family trips 

to the north shore: Mom up front with Luther Vandross on cassette tape, 

my brother counting mile markers and Volkswagens from the backseat. 

But the fog this morning. The Lake. Blue Minnesota daybreak held 

in condensation’s cool embrace, suspended over the waves as if by 

my own sheer need to believe that the tangible can sometimes bend  

the laws of reality. And as I pull into the parking lot of the hospital, 

a pocket of humidity pressed to the seam of the sky feels about to rupture, 

but for the stitching that holds it all together, the tension in the air, the pulse, 

the steady respiration of the freshwater surf.





Michael Gould is a poet and undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including, The Lindenwood Review, Scissors and Spackle and Bop Dead City. He lives in the Twin Cities area and will be pursuing in the fall an MFA at the University of California, Irvine.




Return to May 2015 Edition