The gathering of flesh tightly against itself,
the beginning of a seam. 
                                       When I was a child
I went for a walk in the woods—
the mountain laurel blossoms lit up the bushes
like the kitschy lights of a 1970’s Christmas tree.  I cut my arm open
falling off that old wooden zipline there, the one with the red painted seat
and the wooden handlebars, the one that severed the mountains
in half.  The branches cut my skin
to lace.  There was not
                                     a single binding stitch
on my skull after the surgeon mended my brain, threads
seal the inside from the out, and instead the surgery
was done through my thigh.  During a rupture, blood
seeps through the mind like ink across a wet page.  We lived
next door to a boy scout camp and Gordy double-dog dared
me that I couldn’t ride that ride, that rickety
zipline down
                      the long and twisted

steel cable to the end.  Mountain laurel flowers
drop like withered onion skins after the rush of pink fades
and autumn’s air settles in.  They give you a local when they close
the wound and they call it that, a local, as if your wound
is simply headed to a bar
where it’ll try to stay
                                 sober enough
to make the drive home.  There were three
stitches on my upper right thigh where joint connects
trunk to leg, body to limb, where they threaded that metal stent
up into my brain through my femoral, through my carotid, letting the flow
of my own blood place the ring that stopped the seeping, the ring
that married me to survivor. 
                                             The black bruising
took over a month to heal.  In the follow-up, in the check-up
in the angiogram, after they sliced my groin on the table, after
they injected my artery with dye blacker than crude oil, after
the heat of it snaked through my head, hot as coffee, after
I watched the black syphon through the gray skull shadow
on the monitor, head masking-taped to table so I wouldn’t
don’t move, you mustn’t move, I felt the flutter of blood trickle
between my thighs, I couldn’t find my breath. 
The surgeon called my name
over and over—
breathe his voice still repeats
in my sleep.  Over time some simply
                                                         dissolve
others are carefully snipped while trying not to 
please, don’t move.  Not a single binding stitch in my skull, seven
in my left arm from when I fell, twenty from when they pulled my son
screaming out of the comma cut above my pelvic bone,
three in my upper thigh after the rupture two years
after his birth.  Pink scars fade over time
and wither away, fallen laurels,
the beginning of a seam.

– Tara A. Elliott

Author’s Note: “The Seam” was written as a tribute to the wounds that ultimately save us, the scars of which bind us to further our understanding of who we are. July 31st marks the fifth anniversary of my successful surgery for a brain aneurysm, symptoms of which included double vision and an unrelenting, crushing migraine.

I owe my life to the innovative surgery performed at Johns Hopkins by Dr. Alexander Coon via my upper thigh in which a Pipeline Embolization Device was threaded and placed over the mouth of the aneurysm along the branch of my ophthalmic and carotid arteries. In the months that followed, writing poetry proved a vital component to my recovery. For more about brain aneurysms, please visit the Brain Aneurysm Foundation.