Donating Plasma
The fat of land around New Orleans
where lighter fluid lingers as a missed
nebulizer pump where traffic is mightier
in its harried bitterness than all of the 405
where sleeveless t-shirts barking ham hock
arms demand you SMELL THE FREEDOM
where I have the nerve to ask what it smells like
as dude blanks himself into the next room of
the plasma donation center and does not answer.
It doesn’t smell like this place, or does it—dosed
on disinfectant, screaming with fluorescence,
desperate as a half-full wine glass left out on
the porch, swirled with flies. Ain’t nobody
here out of the goodness of their heart despite
the glib n’ glossy extolments plastered on the walls,
proclaiming donor virtues continents and oceans
away from making rent or groceries, paying down
credit card bills. Pyramids of grinding noise
hover over each bay, clustered so close we’re all
practically bed buddies—there is a sprinkling of
thirsty men who let proximity get the best of their
judgment, recumbent bodies spinning a wheel
of possibility in their heads. When the room pads
towards capacity a mechanical groan that would
strike pride in barons of the Industrial Era wells—
it’s the din of late-stage capitalism too. I am
halfway through according to my machine’s
LED display, a cluster of ice blue zeros that pulse
towards completion until there are twelve of them,
when my arm begins to spurt blood. I am not a
good donor, shoddy grist for the pharma company
that will make magic with my fluids and the middleman
owner, a doctor stuffed in a guy version of mom jeans
who hovers briefly and disappears. My red blood cells
cannot return to my body, doomed to languish in a plastic
sleeve while my head floats away from my neck,
my arm and palm warm and damp. I have no
idea the pain I’m in for that night, but the only
thing I’m stressing over, watching the cracked clay of
my vessel leak from above, is whether or not I’ll get paid.
Karen Lozinski
Karen Lozinski hails from New York City and lives in New Orleans, where she befriends anoles and cicadas and enjoys Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars pupating in her kitchen. She’s a multidisciplinary artist who earned her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. At work on a novel and a poetry collection, her writing appears in Mantis, The Citron Review (2024 Pushcart nominee), Chapter House Journal, Red Ogre Review, The Broadkill Review, The South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Gyroscope Review, Nova Literary-Arts Magazine, Talon Review, and many more.