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Inside Man
E.H. Jacobs

I float among the stars, eyes closed. That’s how you see the stars
and how you float, stuck inside this narrow tube,
head in a cage.

I breathe over the rat-a-tat of expanding magnetic coils, banging like a jackhammer trying to
cleave my skull,
over jazz barely heard through the headphones pressing against my ears.
The metallic taste in my mouth.

I am spinning hydrogen protons, I am space within my body,
I am space around my body. I am stars.
I am the universe.

The doctor will say, “The good news is we found a brain,”
using the same tired joke. I only wish my father were here
to be proven wrong.

Then the doctor will say, “We also found…”
And I’m not filling in that blank today,
playing Mad Libs with my brain.

Funny, I wasn’t claustrophobic until I had been asked 10 times if I was.

—
E.H. Jacobs is a psychologist and writer based in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His work (short stories, poetry, memoir) has appeared in Coneflower Café, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, and Smoky Quartz. He has participated in fiction and poetry workshops with the Kenyon Review. He has published two books on parenting, professional papers in psychology, and articles for the general public on psychological topics, and he has been a contributing book review editor for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. He has served on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. In addition, he is pleased to let you know that he was a finalist in the New Hampshire Writers’ Project Three-Minute Fiction Slam.

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