This is also from Adonis Garage. I'm not sure it's about HCV; it might be HIV. But she gets the results by phone and they used to insist people come in person for HIV tests.


Positive
By Rynn Williams 19612009 Rynn Williams
1. READING THE RESULTS


I dont move,
but the inside corner
of my right eye turns glassy,
then shatters,


hands focus more sharply.


I dont move,
but the pigeon shudders
on the sill.


The door opens to a maze
of wallpaper, family photos
their bliss-frieze burns
the last unaffected corner of my sight,
like molten Karo.


My husbands mouth collapses,
and the air about his shoulders
has crystallized.
We dont say a word,
all the noise is around us,
the letter, half-folded, on the desk,
an albatross, a dove.



2. POSITIVE


Because in those days there were no words
for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept
with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate
at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning:
enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools
of butter, little sides of sauted onions, paper cups of pure
sour cream, Dr. Browns Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser,


but now when the call comes Im sitting in the kitchen
with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump
on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron
sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table,
milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word
heroin makes me feel the lovely way
a body can go slack from inside out.



3. A SINGLE DROP


Id never paid much mind
to my implements, but now
I paint Fire Engine Red


on the handle of my razor, a single drop
on my nail clippers, one long
stroke on my lethal toothbrush


to cordon off my blood,
I tend and sop each splash or seep,
soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets


every bleeding gum, torn hangnail,
paper cut, scrape, gully of cracked lip
another hazard, each


infectious throb now
forever watched as I patrol
my bodys raging arroyo


in the family bathroom,
to keep my children
safe from me.



4. PAPER GOWNS


X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing
those delicate petals (gaping,
cold through the sleeves).
He asks me to extend my palms:
the motion is of pushing away.
Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft
tup, tup, tup, along my spine,
as if checking a cantaloupe.


There is a piece of gum
beneath the windowsill,
green imprint of a thumb.
Were talking percentages, genotypes,
were talking bundled pharmaceuticals.
Studies, it seems, are inconclusive.


I try to look at the big picture:
a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash,
neither in, nor out. On the insurance card,
raised numbers, black ink worn away.
There's a girl on the street with her head back,
the strap of her dress falling carelessly.


Rynn Williams, Positive from Adonis Garage. Copyright 2005 by Rynn Williams. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press.

Source: Adonis Garage (The University of Nebraska Press, 2005)