Marc Lester Yu
by Forrest Gander

Eager Nurses

"Love of the grotesque begins with fear of the body"
--Stan Rice

There they are, naked beneath their costumes:

the one whose arms are fitted into long pipes, whose hands have been swallowed,

the one lugging an unwieldy mass between her legs like the product

of two hundred digit primes, like a mess of spilled intestines,

the one in a "Mexican dance dress," his wrists sewn to the hem,

the hooded one with tentacular arms,

and others sweating under the weight, sweltering

in vinyl in steam their bodies exude

as they bend to gather a ball and throw it across the room.

At the frontier of the unspoken, the unspeakable. Inciting feelings of if

and but. Trapped in armature, ill at ease, with every gesture hampered. Or

                                                                                 are they

enchanted in a resemblance of limitation. Eroticized by the masking,

the hiddenness, the binding. Stuntedly magnificent. Snake-like.

                   Jinking and whisking in the realm of things, where incoherence

is manifest, where pornographic gods are lured

into costumes of disability, into the excruciating heat, the unventilated itch.

On walls painted dead institutional grey, white, and brown

                                                                               hang faces

of the eager nurses who watch. Standing at the door,

we become another of them whose innocent

indeterminately expressive faces vary as vinyl

color and shape. Each dodge ball’s baby-face

matches a face on the wall. Each fetus-ball.

If the nurses look to see their charges are not hurt, they are

silent as the little ones are hurled and dropped and hurled.

 

A children’s game. Who will be hit, who will avoid it?

The eloquence of trauma, and perpetual vulnerability.

As in a dream when the body cannot perform a simple

necessary movement. Crimped like faces in a side-view mirror,

they writhe before the spectators. Riveting

and hilarious, gathering into a theme, the players wave

like undersea coral, acting out a game whose ambiguity

clenches in our throats, appalling and enticing us,

swelling to fill each contrary intention we bestow.

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