lithium_ion ovenbird In the fluorescent glare of a too-white bathroom you’re standing unresponsive before the mirror. Your body isn’t your own. You’re smaller than you should be, shrunken, regressed. You’re wearing a shirt that belongs to your father and it falls almost to your knees. You’re thinner than you’ve ever been, wasting to nothing. When I hug you I feel the stab of your bones against my rib cage. You don’t hug me back. You stare over my left shoulder without saying a word. A nurse takes you from my arms, pulls medical supplies from a backpack. She sets out everything she needs–button sized lithium ion batteries, blood pressure cuff, something that looks like an oversized ear piercing tool that you might find at a low end jewelry store. I begin to panic. I want to stop whatever is going to happen next, but I can’t move. The nurse is brisk and unfriendly. She pulls the piercing gun from a sterile bag, loads it with a battery. “He can’t be allowed to sleep,” she says. “This will artificially raise his heart rate once it’s installed in his chest.” I’m trying to scream but my voice is thick sludge in my throat. You stand without moving, without protesting. You’re far away in a mind that is locked. The nurse presses the gun to your chest and pulls the trigger. You collapse onto the floor, unconscious. The nurse is frustrated. You appear to be asleep and that is not the outcome she intended. She begins to load another gun. All I want to do is run to you and pull your head into my lap so it isn’t resting on the hard tile of the bathroom floor. I want you to know that you’re not alone. But the room dissolves around me and I’m left only with the image of pain twitching behind your closed eyes. I wake with your name in my mouth, my own heart pumping too hard and too fast in its desperation to reach you. 250902 what's it to you? who go blather from