sara Etgen-Baker Poet Light Verse

Notes About The Poem

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SURGICAL HANGOVER

A week after surgery
my body still thinks it’s on vacay~  
lounging in a hammock somewhere  
between nap and nope. 

The doctors say the anesthesia  
left the building ages ago,  
swept out by my liver and kidneys  
like bouncers who don’t mess around.  
But try telling that  
to the sloth currently renting my spine.  

This drowsiness, this brain fog,  
this who replaced my energy with wet cardboard feeling~  
apparently it’s not leftover drugs,  
just my cells sitting in a staff meeting  
trying to recalibrate.  

I imagine them gathered around a table:  
tiny cellular accountants  
shuffling papers, muttering,  
“We’ve been through a lot, folks.  
Let’s all take five… or fifty.”  

Meanwhile, I wander the house  
like a slow-motion ghost,  
forgetting what I came into the room for,  
forgetting what I forgot,  
forgetting that I forgot the forgetting.  

It’s a surgical hangover they say~  
not the anesthesia lingering,  
but my whole system catching its breath,  
like it just ran a marathon  
without telling me.  

So here I am:  
wrapped in blankets,  
moving at the speed of continental drift,  
waiting for my cells  
to finish their existential regrouping.  

Until then,  
I honor the sloth within~  
my sluggish, sleepy,  
post-operative spirit animal~  
who refuses to leave  
and honestly?  
It might just deserve a tiny medal.

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