#polysomnography

Polysomnography Sleep Study, NYU, 2024

The side people see vs the side they don’t, not all disabilities are visible.

Because I snore at night and wake sometimes, chewing on a tongue of terror, my doctor prescribed a sleep study.

Tonight, at the hospital, a nurse binds me to a clinic bed with sensors and wires and straps, an electric kind of bondage — I am tubed and surveilled, expected to sleep soundly in this antiseptic ghost of a bedroom, where someone always listens and someone always watches.

Two a.m., half-addled, I teeter on consciousness, stumble-drunk, one foot in the world and one in slumber. Stare at the glass eye over my head and wonder what all this paraphernalia tells my nurse about me. What can she read on her charts and monitors?

Can she see the yellow eyes that have stalked through my sleep since I was a child?

Can she see the name tags fettered to my wet dreams?

When I wake, I’ll ask her if she can draw me a map through the architecture of sleep to the fountain where my poetry spills forth,

to the spring in the rock and the steaming basin of words where I drown every night;