Tag: medical

Three Poems by Eric Goldfarb

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Discharge Instructions

At the hospital exit the nurse handed me six pages of things that could go wrong. She said most of them would not. This was meant to calm me.

Outside, a man in a blazer argued with the parking machine as if it had taken a side.

I signed where they told me, initialed the smaller lies— yes I understood the wound, yes I understood the pills, yes I understood how a body could be sent home with instructions.

In the car you held the plastic basin in your lap, pale and royal, like somebody being carried from a bad hotel.

We stopped at CVS. I bought gauze, ginger ale, the good crackers—the ones that cost too much, because illness has a lobby, a gift shop, a way of making saltines look like mercy.

At home I put the pages under a magnet shaped like Maine.

For three days I read them the way some people read scripture.

At midnight I touched your forehead. At two I touched it again.

Nothing happened.

Which is also a thing that happens.

*

Booth Four, 11:15

She slides the toast across before he asks.
He tips the creamer into her cup first,
though she has not yet lifted it. Then come
the pills: four of his beside the spoon, two
of hers beside the salt, sorted last night
and carried in the same green mint tin
they have used since the pharmacy changed bags.
A refill comes. He lays his hand flat on
the table so the waitress will not splash her.
When the strawberry arrives, one on the plate,
he moves it to her side without remark.
She eats half, then returns what is left to his.
Outside the window, a bus pulls to a stop.
Nobody gets off.

*

Peaches, Late August

At the peach stand, we both reach toward the bin
and press our thumbs against the ones that give,
not for ourselves. I find one soft and warm,
the kind that bruises looking at it, pass it
to your side of the table without comment.
You have chosen mine already. Farther down,
the farmer stacks his last few empty crates.
A woman holds a melon to the light.
You weigh three peaches in your open palm,
set two aside, and hand me back the one
I would have wanted. It is almost too ripe.
We pay. We walk. You take the paper bag
and hold it slightly out from your body
so the weight will not swing against my hip
the whole way home.

*

Eric Goldfarb writes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta, Georgia. More at eric-goldfarb.com.

Three Poems by Kate Hubbard

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On Grannis Pond Road

There is only the dream of a turtle now,
of days spent paddling the murky water and basking
in the sun. Nights sweaty necked boys full of Busch Light
and bravado tack against the moonlight aiming for the wet
‘pop’ of organs, score keeping the crunch of keratin.
I found a tiny turtle here once before, a red eared slider, alive
but missing an eye and bleeding. I carried him home in my hat.
Bare handed you took him, stroked his heart shaped carapace
and slipped him into your tank. He was the first and last thing
that we ever called ours.

*

In the Details

The devil takes his coffee light
and sweet. He sweeps his crumbs right
onto the rug. The devil wears a rumpled
shirt and above it a white, working man’s grin.
During the National Anthem, he puts his hand
over his heart and winks at you. He likes it
when you lean against the doorframe to watch
him work. He likes to take his time. He likes
to make you wait. The devil leans close when
he says, it’s always better when it’s just you
and me, which is what he says to all the girls.
Everything he gives you belongs to someone else.
He likes your love. But he loves your meanness,
how you talk about the girl who chews like a horse,
how you say, Mr. Ed’s got carrots in her feed bucket
today. It amuses him when you lose your temper
and ball your hands into fists. He likes the cadence
of a raised voice and being the life of the party,
but he doesn’t sign autographs, doesn’t grant
interviews. He saves that for you, lets you listen
to him talk about his childhood, his love
of the snow, his secret pain. You are his favorite
toy. He says, I’ll always take care of you. Always.
He leaves you groping in the dark and deletes
the evidence, but never forgets your birthday.
The devil likes it when you bake him apple pie
and grill him steak. And he likes it when you wear
the stockings with the beautiful backseams
and scrape your finger nails down his spine.
He sets your world on fire. The devil likes to watch
you burn, a Roman candle in white hot pain,
his own sparkling fireworks display. Before
you’re reduced to ash he will take your hand.
He will waltz with you at twilight in the cold concrete
parking garage, inside the warm hue of halogen
security lights. It will be languid and lawless
this shush and sway to imagined music,
sirens in the distance. He will rest his chin
on the top of your head. He will smell your hair
and cradle you til you release like a rag doll
in his arms. Then he’ll check his watch behind
your back satisfied that you’ve forgiven him and leave
you limp. The devil gives good hugs.

*

Temp Job

In the Phase I Clinic, I brew 10 ounces of coffee
in a 10 ounce cup. Sloshing over the rim
is my second sin; the nourishment room
is for the patients. I am an invasive species.
I don’t have scrubs or a labcoat and sometimes
I confuse being earnest with being likeable.
In the lab I parrot the nurses, patient got held.
I don’t know what it means, only that the test tubes
come back empty and we strike through a name.
Time is measured here in points and windows.
It is a long song you cannot hear while you draw
out individual notes. The transport phone trills
with pick ups and the techs tape down the tumbler
so I can return with my blue bag of blood and urine,
without knocking, without breaking my beak
like just another bird butting up against
the glass sky in the hospital atrium.

*

Kate Hubbard is a full-time poet moonlighting as an administrative assistant in the Yale School of Medicine. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Rattle, The Florida Review, Salamander, North American Review, and New Ohio Review, among others.

Four Poems by Lindsay Ratcliffe

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My body has been changed forever

and I wonder if people will know who I was.

I have pieces of metal in various forms
shaping who I am
in more ways than one—
three plates hold my hips in place
preventing them from dislocating.
And screws—I don’t know how many—
holding those plates to my bones.

I don’t want to be buried when I die.
The idea of being trapped underground
even if I am not there, is terrifying,
but if I were, I wonder what would be said
if people found my body in 100 years.

“What the hell happened?”
“So small, so sad.”
“She had Progeria.”

Can you even tell that from a skeleton?
I think of what the anthropologists thought
when they learned of Neanderthals.

The first people to discover them believed
that they were primitive, incapable of language,
people classified as an “evolutionary failure.”

Now people are learning they were intelligent
and capable of caring about each other.

You can learn so much from what’s left behind,
one skeletal bone can say everything.

* 

Exorbitant

A 2023 Porsche,
836 tickets to Disney World,
136 Round trip tickets to London,
3 brand-new Jeep Wranglers,
39 16-inch Macbook Pros,
more than a year of tuition at Brown,
a family of 4 living in Hawaii for a year.

These are just some of the things
you could buy each month
at the price of a life. My life.
The drug company bills
$99, 547.49 a month.
Over a million dollars a year.

Meanwhile I am trying to
remember the lyrics to “Good days”
by SZA while I’m washing my dishes.

* 

The World to Pieces

When I open the email my vision blurs.
Bankrupt. The company that produces
and distributes the medication I need
to stay alive is

bankrupt. Everything feels unsteady.
I don’t know how many needles,
how many tests,
have gone into me getting these
yellow powder-filled capsules.
How do I get my medication?
Will I have to go without?

One email, and all the powder
spills out of the pills straight
down the drain.

*

Stacked Deck

When we were in the hospital
together, getting treated
we argued over a
deck of Uno cards.

He says, “Draw,
until you can play.”
So I did.

Red, blue, green,
everything except
a yellow card.

I ran out of cards
to draw, but we both
lost the game.

*

Lindsay Ratcliffe is a poet from Flat Rock, MI. Her work has focused on her experiences with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. She is graduating from Albion College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and English. Her English degree has an emphasis on Creative Writing.

Feeding the Body by Cam McGlynn

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Feeding the Body

When I can’t gain weight, the doctors reassure me that the baby
will take what she needs from me. Will suck the very calcium out

of my bones, if necessary. She won’t starve.
They let my question float, unanswered, in the air:

But what about me? I didn’t know, then, that mothers
weren’t supposed to worry about themselves.

I put myself on a secret anti-diet, reversing every rule I’d read
as a teen in Cosmo magazines: Always eat dessert first.

Drink only empty calories, not water. Never mistake hunger
for thirst. I have no cravings, only aversions. I eat

rice and beans for two weeks straight when my body
rejects every other food. I tell my doctors about my dizzy spells,

the cold sweats and quickening heart, even at rest.
The air I can’t drag down to my lungs fast enough

for their hungry whine and whistle. “Odd,” they say. “Your baby’s
heart sounds fine”, they say. “See you in a month,” they say.

Frankenstein’s monster, eight-feet tall, whose viscera and bones
were gathered from the slaughter and charnel houses,

lived on nothing but nuts and berries. Did his body, too,
always hunger? My stomach should distend like a blood-sated tick,

but my baby curls inward, instead of pushing out. She rearranges
my organs as she grows hers, shoving my stomach up under

my ribs, with no room to expand. The first thing I do
before getting out of bed is eat. The last thing I do

before going to sleep is eat. I eat every two hours when I’m awake.
I’m so tired of eating. At my eight-month appointment, I step onto the scale.

The nurse and doctor both sigh. “You finally
gained a little weight,” they say. “We were so worried about you.”

*

Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher from Frederick, Maryland. Ever since she was trapped in a deflating moonbounce as a child, she’s been deeply suspicious of street fairs. Her work has appeared in Whale Road Review, Rattle, The Shore, and ONE ART, among others.

Two Poems by Sara Eddy

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Going to Seed

I left lettuce flouncing out in container boxes
ready for picking. I was on the road, ready
for the expansion of travel. Lettuce can’t hold me.

You want a pretty big container for head-growth
and root-spread. It’s almost too on the nose: harvest
leaves from the outside to encourage inner growth.

Lettuces shouldn’t sit next to apples or bananas.
Ethylene causes rapid decay, like too much time
in the city, your feet on concrete.

Lettuce must be eaten fresh, taken as it is, demands
fealty to its moment. It will go to seed before I get back,
and I’ll toss it on the compost for the rabbits and worms.

*

Uphill

I’m driving around looking for a farm stand when my doctor calls.
You don’t know how to be alive she says, something like that.

I don’t really hear her. I’m thinking about hills, where they come from,
whether they feel us scrambling up and down. Whether all the hills

I’ve climbed add up to a mountain, and when it is I’ll be over the hill.
Everything about hills. Now she’s saying you’ve forgotten how to sleep.

I wake up 45x an hour, she says, which isn’t really sleeping at all, is it?
I feel like arguing: that’s the way I’ve always slept, and no one ever complained.

But truly it is harder now to get up these hills. Maybe she’s right,
I don’t know how to be alive. I do know that fresh vegetables

are good for poetry. Hills are good for poetry. And lying awake in bed wondering
how it has come to this, that we don’t even know how to sleep in our tired bodies.

*

Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, and her chapbook of poems about plants, Jewelweed, is forthcoming from Finish Line Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

Four Poems by Leila Abeni Jackson

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IN THE TIME OF GLASS CAPTIVES

Days were measured in indices of refraction. I woke with a fever and, inexplicably, bleeding toes, as though I had been dancing. An ocean of sweat, its tendrils the sheets. I ran a cold shower. Days were measured in millimeters thick. It started with a watchtower, a bottomless brunch, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Around me, people were eating and regurgitating and so I did the same. They spoke of faceless men, palm trees, salt flats. Days were measured in relative efficiency. They piled their plates high and I thought of Kilimanjaro. I excused myself to the bathroom, sweaty and hotcold. When I looked in the mirror, I had a fly’s thousandfold eyes, each surface its own wide and wriggling creature. In the time of glass captives, days were measured in ghosts, in depth of stomach, in eighty-five seconds to midnight. Back at the table, Guantanamo was old news. They were discussing sponsorships and calling for more mimosas. I saw peristalsis thousandfold, villi swaying tirelessly like kelp forests. Like a snake, something in me unhinged its jaw for more.

*

MANY SMALL CRESCENDOS

I was born with my eyes wide open, milky and dark, or so the story goes. In this way, I took the minutes. I bet on black. They shot her in the middle of a busy street, the sun washing its chyme out of her hair, touching her mouth like it intended to climb inside. She spoke charitably about it afterwards: I would tell young girls to follow their dreams, that you can do anything you set your mind to. Magnified and scraping the sky, lips parted. There were clothes, but there weren’t. There were faces, but not really. The next day I went to the body shop. Really, I didn’t know better. I wanted to see it for myself: whose hand, whose cheek, whose swath of knee, which small crescendos went where. They shimmered in the low light. Some of them grew legs. In that moment, it was just somebody’s horrifying basement, some collagist gifting my face to a new naked body. My same forehead. My new hands. It was the same but it was different. Every day the same liver, every night a new vulture. It was a thunderstorm stealing my face, she said, rolling over my body. But it wasn’t real, and anyway, it happens to everyone. You get over it; you move on. This was the radio on a Sunday afternoon, while I was washing the sun’s vomit out of my favorite skin. Supposedly they shot her on a balcony, back to the stars, Venus peeking out from behind her neck like an earring. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. In this way, I took note. I bet on black. The Milky Way beheld us wide open, or so the story goes. I wouldn’t know; I closed my eyes.

*

PULMONARY EMBOLISM

How a bubble in a hose can kill the diver to whom it rushes
To deliver its gifts. How sometimes pain is mistaken
For progress. How I, thinking I would not wake, woke—
Flushed with cold and pressed to a stranger, who said,
With no mouth, you could have died. I chose to take it
As a welcome back, then changed my mind and went with
A simple hello. Until then, I’d had recurring dreams about
This waking up. The curious business of being rearranged
With my eyes closed, like a repeated loser of the shell game,
Never guessing which one hides the stone. It seemed too
Simple to be true—I lived, and so I won—when really,
I’d guessed wrong again and had no idea where the stone
Had hidden itself away. It was too soon to tell, they said,
Whether it was in fact out of my lungs, or whether it was
Giggling somewhere I’d forgotten to check, a hidey-hole
I’d thought was out-of-bounds. I had recurring dreams
About guessing wrong again, though at each moment
You were there to find the right shell, squirreled away.
Oh, love. How I’d laughed with you, felt the air shoot
Up and out, bellies pressed together like rounded drums
When meanwhile, up north, that stray dog in all its
Ravenous beauty scavenged for the most comfortable
Front porch it could find, and my lungs, ever the hosts,
Opened the back door wide.

*

THE TESTAMENT OF ANARCHA

                 I
Shuffled first by my boy—at least I thought
he was a boy, because I once heard
that boys sit higher up—he shuffled me then ran,
giggling, to some light-dark place I knew
I could not follow. After the second day of pushing,
they whispered, she might die, and I thought, good.
I could hold his hand on the way there.
Maybe there would be music.
Shuffled a second time by the doctor,
though he looked more like a grave-robber
to me. Couldn’t imagine what he was possibly doing
except robbing the grave of my grave.
Didn’t stop the blood or the whatever else,
but may have made something entirely new.
Not a child but a monster. He said
you are loathsome, disgusting.
The girls whispered—they said this monster
has thirty faces and all of them are cold
with metal teeth here to chew me up
from the inside. The girls held me down.
I was shuffled twenty-nine more times
and they held my shoulders, my hair,
stuffed a sand-white rag between my teeth
so that I could not speak or scream.
Was it normal? To sweat this much?
Was it normal not to know four years had passed
and yet know I was still loathsome, disgusting?
Littered with debris like some stray animal,
I had long ago accepted that this was hell.
Some days I was a tilled field,
others an axed tree. Often I was the moon,
waiting to be plucked from the sky
by the next steel trap. The girls were all my age.
Sometimes I wondered if their sons ever giggled at them
from behind a light-dark veil every night.
Though we weren’t friends, they wiped my sweat.
Sometimes they cupped my face, like mothers.

                 II
I woke engulfed in tongues of sand, swathed
carefully like a newborn. There was music.

A hundred hands touching me—not to stuff rags between
my lips, but to gently carry away the sobs and spit

born there. An old woman lay on my left, a stranger
whose name I somehow knew, her brown skin sagging

and flaking from its home like paper. She held my hand.
The women whisper-chatted amongst themselves,

breasts all bared like new mothers who had forgotten
their shame. They helped me to my feet, bathed

me in the surf until I stopped saying loathsome, disgusting,
until I forgot the shape of the words in my mouth.

There was music. There were hands in my hair,
teasing it into shapes. I thought there would be fire, I said.

The women laughed, as a bird laughs when staring down a rifle:
as though carrying the knowledge that only a chosen few are blessed

with flight. I had no pain, and whether or not I had scars
didn’t seem to matter. My dead skin snowed off in sheets

below the buttery and unplucked moon. I did not tell them
that I had met the Devil, the endless hollowings,

the deaths of all I’d never owned. I didn’t have to.
They already knew. When I held still, there was music.

*

~ Author’s Notes ~

“In the Time of Glass Captives” is after Evan Antonakes’ “Crack”.

“Many Small Crescendoes” is dedicated to the increasing number of women who, due to advances in artificial intelligence, have had their face and likeness used without their consent. AI pornography is a deeply violating reality. Like other concerns addressed in this collection, it robs people of ownership over their bodies.

“The Testament of Anarcha” pays homage to Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who underwent over thirty gynecological surgeries without anaesthesia to treat her vaginal fistula and to serve as a test subject for research in the field. Her tormentor, J. Marion Sims, is still honored today as the “father of gynecology”. In his autobiography, he repeatedly describes her body as “loathsome” and “disgusting”.

*

Leila Abeni Jackson is a proud DC native and a Pushcart-nominated Harvard undergraduate studying English and History of Science. Her work appears in the Harvard Advocate, Rattle, Sixteen Rivers Press, and elsewhere. She is the former poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate and her most recent work includes her senior thesis, Uncharted Song, a poetry collection which explores Blackness and the medical body through time.

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

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Bitch

               “Better Bitch Than Mouse”
               ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg

The Cancer Care Center is on the third floor
of a four-story rectangular prism on 3rd Street
whose overflow parking lot faces a food pantry
where we often see a line of the Phoenix hungry
and Christopher holds my hand as we walk toward
the building I have grown to loathe even though
the receptionist, Mike, is nice, slightly droll,
as he snaps another plastic I.D. bracelet around my wrist,
even though we tagged my young blond doctor Boy Genius
on the first meeting, even though the nurses flutter around
the big-windowed mini-gymnasium of pleather chairs
like angels, even though there are photos of dogs
in party hats dangling from strings and a wide basket
of packaged snacks like Chips Ahoy and Rice
Crispy Treats and they offer us cold water bottles
and warm blankets and there are big screens
blathering home decorating shows from the wall
and a glass display case of wigs and hats and bras
for sale in the entry and a view from our chairs
of flat rooftops surrounded by a panorama of desert
mountains.           It is 2025, in the fire-hot summer
month of the sturgeon full moon, and I hate it more
every time I swim in to strike another bargain
with death; all of us have. We never knew we’d end
up here together: the young woman sleeping fetal
position in a chair, old man in a hillbilly beard
and baggy jeans, dude in a basketball uniform.
We are bald, patchy haired, or capped in turbans.
We are nauseous or munching on free processed crap.
Or we (i.e. me) are bitchy, questioning each shot,
each treatment and the garbage pail of side effects,
my partner growing weary of my boat rocking,
asking, can’t you just trust the doctors? to which I snap NO.
My therapist affirms anger as a necessary grief stage
and I say fury and I say I know I can be a bitch
and I say it’s hard to be one’s highest self when things
are hard and she says our higher self doesn’t mean sweet
and she says BITCH is an acronym for Babe In Total Charge
of Herself                      and I breathe.

*

Self Portrait as Patient

I pop half a Xanax before my appointment,
but it doesn’t really help. I am not a drug person

and my oncologist wears bright orange Nikes
as he makes his rounds, smiles and waves
at me in my corner chair next to the exit

where I can be invisible, yet scope the room
while clear chemicals enter my veins through tangled tubes

and they call this drip an infusion and the rules
post-chemo are no kissing or exchanging bodily fluids

for three days and to launder all linens and clothes in hot water.
I      pop      half      a      Xanax      before      my      appointments

so I can be invisible, close my eyes and disappear.
My one-positive-affirmation-a-day calendar
recently read: “I can do hard things,”

to which I replied, “fuck you.” I don’t want to do any more
hard things. I want peace and ease and to eat dessert after every meal.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Arizona who believes in the power of writing to heal. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The New Verse News, Rattle, and other cool spots. She is the author of four books of poetry and teaches Wild Writing for 27 Powers and writers.com. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Two Poems by Veronica Tucker

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Once, on the Oncology Floor

A teenager asked
if he’d ever drive again.
No one knew what to say.
So I showed him
how to press the nurse call button
like it was an ignition switch.
He laughed,
and for a minute,
the hallway turned
into an open road.

That night
I dreamed of him
parallel parking
between stars.
I woke with the memory
of his hand
gripping the rail
as if it were
a steering wheel.

*

In the Absence of Fever

When you said
she was stable,
I nodded.
But my hands
stayed clenched
as if the storm
was only
paused.

We celebrated
with applesauce
and the hum
of an IV pump.
I told her
she looked strong
when what I meant was
please stay.

I never asked
how long she had
before the numbers slipped again.
There are days
when stability
is the most fragile thing
in the room.

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Ode to My Spine by Valerie Bacharach

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Ode to My Spine

Vertebrae, pale as winter sun, fixed in place
by screws tiny as a newborn’s fingernail.
Trace its path on the x-ray—
a trail alive with reconnecting protons and electrons.
When I sit in silence, I can hear
the swift flow of blood,
ligaments with their quiet song.
Nerves freed from compression flare
down my leg like last night’s lightning.
Muscles speak again in the body’s code—
contract and release, release and contract.
My spine’s aging column holds me
erect as one foot steps forward,
hovers in space above sidewalk,
breath held tight in lungs, my future a tenuous thing.

*

Valerie Bacharach is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her book, Last Glimpse, will be published by Broadstone Books. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net.

My Heart is a Shattered Windshield by Victoria Melekian

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My Heart is a Shattered Windshield

Four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I’ve driven
three hours to a Best Western in the crappy part of town
for my son’s doctor appointment in the morning.
The desk clerk asks if I’m here on business or pleasure.

I look at the mangled Von’s grocery cart in the empty parking lot
through smudges on the glass lobby door. “Pleasure,” I say,
but the truth is neither. Untreated, my son’s life expectancy
is two point eight years. His disease can be managed,

but not cured, and the cost of medication is near impossible.
The truth is we’ve waited thirteen months for insurance
approval to see this specialist. The truth is I’m a howling
windstorm of fear—my boy is thirty-seven, not even middle aged.

I don’t yet know there is hope, that tomorrow the doctor will reach
into a drawer and toss my son a six-thousand-dollar miracle drug,
a bottle of pills lobbed across his desk like a red and yellow
beach ball sailing through a shimmering summer sky.

*

Victoria Melekian lives in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. She writes poetry and short fiction. You can read her work here: www.victoriamelekian.com

Five Poems by Ron Riekki

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The Kid Who Drank Himself to Death During the War

lived in the barracks right across from mine.
His face was all brilliant with light, like
the sun hitting the ocean. And they hit us
in boot camp, the revelation of that, how
the recruiters don’t mention this little fact,

or they did—unsure if they still do it now,
but my suspicion is yes, the fists all bone
and temple, the church of war. I remember
my mind before the explosions, how it used
to think properly, or maybe it didn’t, the river

near my home owned by the mines now,
oranged. I walked to it yesterday, stared
down into the deranged red, so close to
the color of blood. I pulled up my hood
and walked home. I can walk though.

*

I Worked in Prison

My jobs have all been fist fights for cash.
When I was a boxer, I started getting tremors,
the doctor telling me to stop or they’d become
permanent. I stopped. They stayed. I thought
about how I’d been a boxer my whole life,
even before I was boxing, how the military
takes your skull and kills it. Sure, you can
still live, but it’s a bit like your body is
a house that’s been built, but abandoned,
foreclosed, possessed, a sort of Satanism
to corporation, a sort of corpse-creation,
that reminds me so much of prison, how
there were all these sons in there, no sun,
the paleness of their skin, everyone, no
matter your race, how it looked like they
were all fading, their psyches, their souls,
the violence where if they ever got out
I knew they’d be changed, how violence
stays in your veins, how a bloody life
stays in your blood, how we really,
honestly, could do anything else other
than what we’re doing and it’d be
better, but we’re promised to this cash.

*

(lucky) I Work in Medical

Which means medical works
me, because medical doesn’t
work, because of this equation:
politics + medicine = politics,
and the nursing homes aren’t
homes and there isn’t nursing
there, because the CNAs and
the med techs and the EMTs
are all making minimum wage,
which means my partner fell
asleep driving the ambulance,
turning it upside-down, just
like his life, trying to make

the torment of rent, how it
tore into us, you, me, every-
one when even the EMTs
don’t have health insurance,
and we know that the word
minus ends with US, because
it’s all about erasers, melting
pots where the kids come in
overdosing on marijuana and
one of them says, But you can’t
overdose on pot and I tell him
Well, you are right now and
it’s beautiful—hyperemesis,

how it is, this existence where
the overdoses are normalized,
where my uncle, his heroin
addiction in a hick town, how
I call him and he answers,
voice in slow motion, the ice
outside his window so loud
that I can hear it, the blizzards
of poverty (the anti-poetry),
A Cell of One’s Own and
we’re owned and I’m ranting
about the renting because I
am worried as hell about home-

lessness because the word virus
ends with US and this won’t
get published unless the editor
has been to the pub and is OK
with saying f- censorship—too
afraid to write the word, too
afraid to talk about how when
they play the sexual harassment
training videos at work, everyone
does a play-by-play commentary
like Misery Science Theater 2021,
how we’re all Orwelled and all it
takes is one hospital bill to end a life.

*

In This Poem, I Am Happy and Blessed

but it’s a short poem. It’s a poem where God
gives me a bird, walking, at my feet, how I
almost didn’t see it, the thing rainbowed as
all hell. Who makes something that beautiful?

I snuff out my clove, hurry inside to my cubicle.

*

I Can’t Stop Winking

It’s a defective muscle. My trauma-head
all butchered. But people misread it, think
I’m flirty. Or that I’m sharing some sort
of secret with them. They look directly
in my eyes with a look like yes, I under-
stand too or yes, I saw it as well. Saw
what? The occasional frown, sometimes
a wink back, sexy. But I’m twice
their age. I want to apologize, say
that my eye is owned by history, but
they just move on, their bodies so
perfect, able to control everything.
How do they do that? How?

*

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).