The Wisdom Factory

By Alisha Goldblatt

By the airport where jet engines riff and fly

humdrum in the background, you’ll find the

cutting room floor. There’s bloody gauze and
extractors on hand, eerily cheerful nurse–escorts

shuttling the wounded out of the lot. Their heads

are wrapped in ice diapers to ward off the swells

One after one they exit without those
hard vestiges to remind them where they began,

when chewing was a job for the decisive hunter. After

coming back to consciousness (the stupor itself an

outtake cut clean from the film), my daughter woke
laughing, drank texting until I took the phone and

righted the gobbledygook of fat, anesthetized thumbs.

She quiet–roared with a mouth that wouldn’t open wide,

a little girl growing soberer and soberer. Already she
was missing the drugs and those nubs in the back of the

mouth, ancestral and taken from her just as she

begins to cut her teeth on this very knife–edge of life.