Aspiration

By Angie Macri

Open the deep part of bone
to the doctor’s needle,
what she said will be pressure,
maybe discomfort, but becomes
his exclamation. No other way
to read the marrow, she says
more than once, her manner
of apology. She bears
down on his back with her body
to get what is needed. Strip
a scream of its parts: first voice,  

then air. You end with the hollow 
of mouth held by bones in concert 
with the brain and its signals.
One week for results, she reminds you
because you, his partner, will remember.
This is the object breathed in
but not foreign, his genetic sequence,
your hope or ambition.
You draw a breath like an image.
The act of sound 
is produced by the exhale.

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Angie Macri is the author of Sunset Cue (Bordighera), winner of the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize, and Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Recent poems appear/are forthcoming in The Common, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Pleiades. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs.