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  • Gadolinium (Gd)
  • Christian Gullette (bio)

Intravenous ions,    metallic complex for the MRI scan,

        I watch his body become an interstate            of dye-drenched veins,

contrast agent tracing    the melanoma gripping the back of his eye.

        Whatever privacies there are in this body,

they are different than what he arrived with,

        a body happening            as I watch it,

    microscopic spaces        now paramagnetic,

coursing with gadolinium, one of the rare-earths

        though I'm barely acquainted with the world            blurring before me.

I pretend to understand these scans.

        His brain looks like water            after rinsing a brush

        or a night view from space,            the planet's cities

phosphorescing grids    where darkness adheres to the edges. [End Page 126]

Christian Gullette

Christian Gullette is a 2019 National Poetry Series finalist, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Cherry Tree, Western Humanities Review, Meridian, and other journals. Christian serves as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review and is currently a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

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