Plasmapheresis

Another Saturday morning at the CSL Plasma center. I begin with signing in to their computer system by answering their routine questionnaire and by sealing my responses, answered to the best of my knowledge and ability, with a scan of my right thumbprint. Afterwards I walk back to the front desk and stand in line. I settle into a pose that I hope the others in waiting will read as "friendly," "sympathetic to the plight of the common CSL Plasma donor," and also as a means of conveying a "sorry, but I can't talk right now, you see, I've brought my book bag--I'm terribly busy" vibe. I look behind me at the people sitting in the lobby chairs. I'm feeling rather out of place here in the waiting room with this crowd, but hey, I don't get paid from my real job till Monday and I know I'll definitely need plenty of cigarettes later tonight. I mean, I'll have to hang out with someone like Juliana. Whatever. I just need a way to obtain more cigarettes. Then come 4:00 am, I'll also be needing a honey-butter chicken biscuit from Whataburger to cap off the night.

Eventually I make my way to the front of the line and the frumpy front desk woman calls out my name. I acknowledge her with a smile. Another woman who sports a Tinker Bell graphic t-shirt and wickedly slicked back hair turns sharply to the frumpy woman at the front desk:

--'Scuse me, Miss, how come he gets to go next? You see me all sittin' right here and waiting?

Frumpy woman:

--The rules have changed. You stand in line right after you sign in, honey, you don't just sit down. Sorry, didn't anyone tell you? Go ahead and get in line so you don't have to keep waiting all day. I'm sorry, honey.

Tinker Bell slumps down into her seat and scowls:

--…lookin' ass mothafucka...

I am just within ear shot of her mumbling. I know she posses no real threat to me; she's just a woman looking for a break, trying not to get stepped on, trying to earn some cash. You know it's hard out there. I'm sure she's great outside of the facility, and anyway, I hear "mothafucka" is just a way to build solidarity among subcultures, so now I've pretty much scored with the plasma donor community. But "lookin' ass?" What "lookin' ass?" Did I overdress? With my right hand clenching my book bag, I walk pass Tinker Bell and a conspicuous homeless man in flannel who is now petting his bluetooth earpiece. I wonder to myself to whom he is corresponding, but I really don't care all that much. Must be the cardigan. It's too much.

After the screening process (today my blood's protein level is a little high, as I ate two honey-butter chicken biscuits yesterday), I am directed to the back of the building where there are at least thirty leather beds and centrifugal plasma extractors. Employees of the plasma donation business pace around, checking to see who's containers are close to being filled, who's beginning to dose off, and who's forgetting to pump their fists during the blood withdrawal phases of each extraction cycle.

I breathe in the rancid air and lay my right arm to my side, ready to be pierced by another catheter. One of the employees, a mousy brunette, comes and asks if I am allergic to iodine. I reply that I am not. Then she asks me for my name and last four digits of my social security number to verify my identity. CSL Plasma doesn't just take plasma from anyone, after all. She walks off to check on another donor. To make use of my time I decide to write a letter to my friend, Tanner, who moved to Colorado eight months ago. I take out a pen and an olive-green stationary from my bag. My friend and I make a point to keep going at this epistolary exchange so that one day when both of us are dead, we'll have these amazing, experimental musings of prose to be complied and placed at the back of our anthologized works. Oh, that's when he started developing his very complex ideas on class structure and its subjugating effects on people through music! I try to remember what he wrote to me last week. Man do I need a cigarette. Did I ever say I was donating my plasma to help save lives? No, I didn't. Get that cash, Marshall.

I survey the room. Most of the other donors are staring at the facilities's television sets. "Transformers" is playing on one of them. I don't plan on watching the movie, so I direct my thoughts back to my letter.The same mousy brunette comes back and asks if I am allergic to iodine. No, you've asked that twice. I reply that I am not. She proceeds to apply an iodine soaked swab in a circular motion on the skin concealing my median cubital vein and shortly after inserts a catheter. A hose is connected to the machine that will take away my blood. When the apparatus is assembled, I return to my letter. The naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the features themselves, fragmenting what was really once whole. Language, repeated over time, produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as facts. Take "love handles" and "weenuses"… Exactly. I look around the room again. In front of me there is a very muscular man with a long orange ponytail who stares blankly at the ceiling. There is a Hispanic man grinning and flirting with one of the female staff. His eyes are red cherries ready to pop out of their sockets. Is anyone here not using their pay from CSL Plasma for drugs? Nope.

The Black man in grey sweats to the Hispanic man's right:

--Oh, yeah! March Madness!

Confused, I look above to another television set to see what he means. Basketball. Right. I turn back to my letter, but the man keeps looking at me for affirmation. So, I look back up to smile and nod my head. Be polite. He shakes his head at me and laughs. It's the cardigan. I'm feeling rather out of place with this crowd. I wonder on average how many donors must swarm in through the facility through the course of an hour.

I write: In physics, so much is defined by what is lacking, or what might have been there one second but now has moved on in its course. The brick wall behind my back is none of the following: a summer breeze, a thick and fuzzy quilt, a point of reference to plot on a Poincare map. A brick wall is defined by time and space, that's why, and as much as I love Dali, this brick wall is quite rigid. It will never slump forward as I do on the ground. Only memory slumps forward. Do you like the color of this stationery? Personally, I'd rather it be more minty. I can relax my fist now as the machine's cycle has gone on to the centrifuge phase of the cycle. I can't think of any thought that I'm proud enough with artistically to write in my letter.

The Hispanic man calls out to another of the employees, a curvy, chirpy blonde:

--Miss, I need assistance.

He is met shortly by the blonde and he mumbles something I cannot hear. The blonde opens her mouth in comic disbelief and then laughs:

--Mr. Rivera!

To the left of Mr. Rivera a plump woman in overalls asks the mousy brunette if she's one of the many young women that have fallen prey to the Twilight series. She says she is not.

Plump woman:

--They're really good stories.

Mousy brunette:

--You've read them?

Plump woman:

--No, no, no. It's just what I've heard, really. You know, they made them into movies?

It doesn't take too long for me to climb out of the trench that is weariness of and doubt in humanity. My container is now half full with my plasma. It is a dark amber color without my red blood cells, my white blood cells, and my platelets. I write: What is it with this obsession with being untouched, unstained? There is a constant fear of alien invasion. How do humans feel about symbiosis, really? Why go on perpetuating these pretended brick walls? Is it really that a clean room makes for a clean mind?

From the corner of my eye I catch Tinker Bell making her way into the room from the lobby. Cardigan. I make sure there are no instances where I might accidentally make eye contact with her. Almost immediately I'm distracted by a voice that comes from an older woman adjacent to me:

--I like your cardigan.

I turn to her, stumble for a bit with my words, but finally manage to respond:

--Oh! Well, thank you very much!

She asks me where I got it and I tell her at GAP. She says we don't have one here in Abilene and I tell her she is correct and that I got my cardigan from a store back in Waco. She pulls back her brown curly hair from her face:

--I don't shop there.

I nod my head and exclaim that it's not for everyone.

The process of plasma extraction is complete. Mousy brunette comes back around and asks me for my name and last four digits of my social security number to verify the account to which CSL Plasma will sends funds of roughly twenty dollars. I try to fathom the existence of the everyday CSL Plasma donor, but it's hard to abstract the character in question. Simply put, we're just all plasma donatin' lookin' ass mothafuckas, looking for a break, trying not to get stepped on, and trying to earn some cash. Resolved and at peace with the donor community, I write my signature at the bottom of my letter. I climb off the leather bed, my elbow wrapped tightly in sand colored bandaging, and head back to the waiting room.

Roulettenburg

she threw her hands at

the winding locomotive,

circling hap—red—black

dear tree

how long you have been

drowned in brain sap! Peel off the

bark, streeeeeeeeetch. yours truly

Charlie "Bird" Parker: and the Plot Thickens

The Bird-Dexterity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHiPQpUv2c0

She began to rouse out of her ritualistic high as the record player's needle, having already moved into the furthest orb of the B side to her Charlie "Bird" Parker anthology, lifted its beak from the vinyl. She then gave Frank, whom she always took for a real furtive peeper, the look, "darling, do you sometimes think a saxophone is really just a siren meditating from within a gold sarcophagus?"

Frank turned his head to meet her eyes. He imagined an ocean tide falling back, crawling back to its mother and revealing glistening artifacts of earlier motion. And what evidence did the water in her eyes hold? She seemed to pull him in closer with each breath she took. He looked and saw fragments pointing back to prehistoric nebulae caving in and exploding in starlight cadence, luminescent jellyfish stranded by ocean tide. She hummed along to the velvet improvisations and he wondered. There was not one reflection, but always an infinite number.

A stack of jazzy travel fiction lay tilted, ready to tip over onto the floor. With one struck match, the sprawl would give into burning devastation, and these were the depths he wanted to explore.

"Well, as you know, " she tossed out leisurely into the morning air in her usual, privileged laugh while cutting into her poached egg with a new, cold, and calculative manner of a mathematician, "all we ever do is plan total social destruction on these…unsuspecting targets."

She pointed down to the floor in the shadows of the travel fiction to a photograph of a young woman. Frank looked down at her face.

Sorake Beach's Sting, pt. 1

Our translator, Andrew (the preacher from Medan, Sumatra), greets us in the Peace Hotel cafe where our bible study group will be assembling in a couple of minutes:

--Ya'ahowu!

I respond:

--Ya'ahowu (Ahhh, there are those yellow teeth I've been missing for the past thirty minutes)!

His evangelical assistant, Marganda (the lawyer from Sumatra), wears his same incessant grin under the brim of his fishing hat:

--Horas!

Our group, which has for the past few weeks been helping with medical clinics in Lagundri's surrounding villages, sits down at a long picnic table covered with a green plastic tablecloth. The cafe is open to the sea breeze, and each pore on my face is filled with its breath. The floor is dusty. My mind goes back to the fish our hotel family grilled for us earlier in banana leaves. Fried grains of rice stick to the flimsy green covering. There are water bottles and sugar cookies for the group that will be meeting in a few minutes. Alex, Jordan, and Logan all sigh and fan themselves. We all look out toward Sorake Beach as it is illuminated by a generous portion of flickering and rosy light. Surf boards rest against nearby coconut trees.

I remember that Andrew told us villagers will climb up the coconut trees, often inching up to heights of around seventy-five feet to pluck coconuts. Some fall and die. Coconuts are buoyant, they float in the bay and wash up on new beaches further down the island of Nias. The stringy white insides of the coconut is exposed as a small boy slices it open with a machete. Under the sunlight, the coconut milk ferments. Generally the Nias islanders are a strong and hard working people, but some men will waste day after day drinking the alcohol from the coconut, laying out of the beach, unemployed. They just lie out on the sand under the sun and bake away. I remember laughing when I heard all of this. I knew no other way to react. It was all so absurd. People climb up trees for coconuts knowing they could easily fall to their death and then, if they make it down the trees intact, they celebrate by getting trashed off the coconuts.

Farrowing Crate Blues

These days we are oozing out our last words,

Congealing upon the cold floor.

Oh, lard, we squeal as

We spill over the cool metal clamps of our world,

Our farrowing crate.

We heard all about the master's divine plan

--For us to sow the earth.

More children to bear, to fatten up, and to nurse.

Each day we long for the cool wallow outside

Our narrowing gate.

We saw you eyeing our bellies under the sun.

The sweaty itch crawls up your spine

As we nurse the new, pink piglets.

You stoop down and smile at the swine.

"Master promises us mud and cheese!"

Oink! Oink! lap it up.

Master examines the litter. Mother to Mother:

"The poor runt doesn't stand a chance."

picante sauce

But she does't ask for picante sauce. She specifically says, "no." Does the drive through crew think that they owe her something, because they take so long?

And the reason she doesn't ask for cheese tonight is that the one time she did, they, in return, carelessly placed unmelted slices of American cheese on her taquito before sending it off through the drive through. If it takes them twenty minutes to make a taquito, they could have at last melted the cheese. So, now, that is why she doesn't ask for cheese.

Really, though, she just wishes food was free.