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KAFKA’S TOOLBOX | Elly Katz
You sit in a chair, feel
the old self become older, thinking
of the patience of water, the boredom of fossils. Can it be
called action, this waiting
as a single snowflake makes a blizzard of one?
Days like this, you think silence is a smashing,
opening the next page, or it perhaps a
breaking, shutting.
Think of Buddhists, how they find peace here.
Think of Kafka, how he finds violence here.
You think of how words wallpaper, tidy & assemble
chairs in the rooms of your life, how a house makes
your grief sit down & keeps your anger lukewarm.
You think nothing is good or bad, not even
the darkness that fills your room like a vat of poison.
You think of selves housed
by history, living quarters you didn’t select but must
live in, how yours are painted from floor
to ceiling in vertigo & uncut fingernails of pain, how you’ve gone
from that nail-biting, A+ academic hell-
bent on DNA polymerase & nylon gloves to the most monastic monk
of the quiet game, your twenties & now thirties
never yours but your stroke’s. Can you even call your stroke
yours like that pair of sunglasses you refused to take off one summer,
even in the umbrella’s sandy shade?
Your classmates walk past the window, their blue-lit faces erased in screens.
You want to wave but can’t raise an arm.
Your head sags until you can’t find it. You taste
the curdled milk of being the something that is
missing.
It’s the same wherever
you sit. Does the voice spoil before
the body, or does the body spoil before the voice?
You think of your ninth grade teacher winding up
& down rows of desks, his dress shirt sweat-
stained at the armpits, even in November, & how he was
Kafka’s greatest fan. You think of his breaths growing
ragged with the thrill of injustice & his locker-room
smell. The nauseating pendulum of his purple polka-dot tie
leak in.
You know that by handing yourself over to nothing,
you will feel your lungs ready themselves for a foggy future.
You miss the permission slips you signed Karin because your mom forgot,
sneaking
out of school early for physical therapy
when you ducked into the corner shop for ice cream sandwiches.
Now you know your own absence like the friend
you traded baseball cards with under the playground’s slide,
your skinned knees crossed but still revealing
too much of your bright pink underwear.
You know desire only gives you more sorrow, that sorrow
only gives more pitch to the climax of what’s not your life, straddling you
like slow-moving shadows before night starts its thought process of making
dark the space that was just light.
You lie in bed with one eye open & the other screwed tight, tucked in the no-
woman’s-land where the miraculous hours of your
absconded
girlhood rub luck into quarters slotted into vending machines,
giving your mouth something to do while your teacher went on
about Kafka’s “frozen sea” & the “axe” of whatever it was he was saying.
Elly Katz was working towards a doctorate at Harvard at 27 when she went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived the resulting brainstem stroke caused by the physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of this, she discovered the power of poetics. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). ellykatz.com