by Elisabeth von Uhl
“To have pain is to have certainty.” Elaine Scarry
Her kasaya is the saffron of exhaustion:
tightly-woven threads now pitches
of a higher oscillation (anxiety rips through body).
Pain radiates, dissolves, then nothingness.
I ask her for the meaning of life (“now you
feel how nothing clings to you") thinking her answer
would be the sweet jolt of a tart lemon drop trapped in back
of throat, but, instead, she digs her fingernails
into my forearm and whispers "fuck"!
Elisabeth von Uhl has earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, a 2021 “Bronx Recognizes Its Own” Award, and has had a poem nominated for “Best of the Net”. She has earned scholarships to the Prague Summer Writers’ Conference, Greenwich Village Writers’ Workshop, and Vermont College’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published in Lunch Ticket, The Cortland Review, SHIFT, cream city review, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, OceanSea, was published by Finishing Line Press.
Emerge Literary Journal 