by Sara Backer
Time travel injuries are hard to treat.
Recovery is rare. The mind unwinds
as arms and legs appear and disappear.
We house the patients by their years of birth.
A roommate from their future tends to scare
new ones who need some hope of being cured.
You see, Alexa’s tongue has healed today,
and she could eat her steak from yesterday—
but now her mangled hand can’t hold a knife.
Raoul still tries to kill himself in bed
face-down on pillows till he suffocates.
He wakes face-up, on fire with pain and rage.
Our staff does not last longer than a year.
They check their phones and even X the days
off calendars like prisoners of old.
All of us come to doubt our sense of time,
and time itself is injured by our travel.
Anti-chronologists keep chasing myths
of immortality ignoring risks
of random errors that will land them here,
where life eternal is our constant fear.
Published in Space and Time Magazine