Laurie Blauner

The Psychiatrist

The mind can change the body. And vice versa. I peer out my office window, rake clouds with my thoughts. What are ideas good for? Action? Where do they lead us? I am attracted to transformations, the seasons, repairing a car or a house, an animal dressed as a person, gluing a broken plate together. I stare at my new client’s red lips. Her mouth is moving like the woman last night in the opera whose head could explode with all that fury and sound. This woman rambles, waits for something to happen without losing too much of herself.

My adulthood, she says, is a bucket on top of my head I can’t remove.

That’s not how this began, I state.

I write in my notes: I’m in a noisy, hot, humid jungle, wafting with the smell of coconuts, mangos, and moist earth. Monkeys climb nearby. Birds chitter and animals howl behind fat tree leaves.

She tries again. My father stuck his feet in sand when he talked to us.

And your mother? I ask.

I write: I’m thinking of a painting depicting rocks with a clock draped over them and a woman watching time from a faraway landscape. Can someone enter or leave a body and leave their mind intact?

The world is in this room and not in this room. The talking woman in the chair across from me grows smaller as her words unburden her. Soon I can hardly hear her voice. I stop writing. She’s so tiny and light she could drift away in a slight breeze. Everyone is different. Some people enlarge, become an animal, vegetable, mineral, or another sex or age or color. Some stop or start eating or sleeping, return to their homes and spouses, or find new ones. People are mysteries begging to be untangled.

Hop into my pocket, I tell her, and I will take you to the opera tonight to see who there will live and who will die. What would we do without our minds?

 

What Fills Me Isn’t Real

When we slipped the wooden masks onto our faces we didn’t know what we would become. Our brains painted and suddenly reserved for someone else. A smell of rain and greening leaves. Our eyes, mouths, and nostrils insisting. Our bodies had no reasons to leave. We didn’t know how to talk to each other at first. Until the ghosts arrived, catching in our hair and clothes. Then we were pinned like butterflies. One of us wore a brightly colored scarf and another’s large ears carried aloft a boxy black hat. Did we really know each other?

Look at all those saints, a man with a hook-nosed mask said of the church.

We were inside the building, preparing to be returned to someplace we didn’t know. I remember how our skin echoes like a drum, I murmured, thinking about surfaces. Few were interchangeable. We are unique, I claimed although our masks were identical. Everything else about us became a clue.

I didn’t know what to do about my inappropriate hands, palms together/apart. My feet turned themselves inward. One ghost didn’t enjoy our personalities. Soon enough a man in a larger mask explained our inadequacies and our bodies understood but wanted to rebel. Candles were clotted with flickering lights. Something sharp and wet rose from the floor. A dampness. The corners were filled with a swirling dust. A man hovered, fastened to pieces of wood. Our ghosts wanted to stay even though our bodies left. I wasn’t sure when it was that I learned how to fly.

 

Under the Weather

With my energy ebbing, all I could do was watch blood-colored flames reach and intertwine in my fireplace. A smell of saltwater oozed from my skin. I wanted to offer aching pieces of my body to each visitor. All I could eat was raisins and toast. In my feverish dreams I encountered good monsters with sharp teeth. Too many hands reached for me through my darkened room.

Meanwhile wind scoured the ocean, searching for me for what felt like years. I could hear it outside my house. My body surged and fell with the weather as if the weather had invented me. My facial expressions reminded me of clouds in fading sunlight, gauzy, bruised features huddled together and smearing. I was frequently apologizing to rain or snow or ice but I didn’t know what for. I’ve missed whichever season wasn’t present, but there were special days when all four arrived at once, and I didn’t lack anything further.

I mourned my former body. I opened my mouth near the fire hoping the flames would leap inside and heal me. Another fire-eater. Maybe I was worse than I thought. Maybe I was untethered and shrugging into a new form of life, one resistant to all kinds of infections and temperatures like plastic floating in an ocean. I frowned at the wet towel on my forehead. Certain parts of me were hot and other parts were cold, as if I was imitating this world. I picked up things to eat and then decided not to eat them. I was hoping to viscerally burn through everything, to become nothing, resembling another weather.

 

Laurie Blauner is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a book of hybrid nonfiction. A new hybrid nonfiction book called Swerve is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Her latest poetry book, Come Closer, won the Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press.