Platelets.

• Author: Hadas, Rachel
• Position: Poem

Do you not see how necessary, a World of Pain and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! John Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 1819 I gave platelets. Why? Because I could. And sitting still and tethered by my blood an hour made it easier to read The Trial . Things I heard later that day seemed to confirm what Kafka had to say: "Case. Higher-ups. Sooner from you than me." "These chairs belong to us, but you may use them." My platelets too ate mine, and I don't lose them passing them on to what blind chance may choose them. Windowless donor center, Citicorps-- this underground environment I share with Kafka. Ah, but Keats is also here, flipping through whose pages with the hand free to riffle back and forth, I find a passage that I only understand now--on my pulses, as Keats also said: "Do you not see how necessary a world...