Tag: Waiting Room

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

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Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC

There are no mothers here
but when your daughter
invites you, you go and sit
on the wooden bench, grateful
to be there, after months
of silence. You sit next to the girl
holding the ring that fell
from her septum the night before
while your daughter’s in back,
getting the stud in the cartilage
of her left ear replaced
with a thin gold hoop.
It’s a rook, she’d explained
before the dark eyed piercer
with the sleeve of tattoos
called her name.
She’d traced the map
on the wall, showed you
the geography of all the ways
an ear can be pierced.
Conch, orbital, daith, helix.
Snakebites,
the name for the silver
studs dotting each side
of her lower lip. The post jutting
through her left eyebrow
looks like it hurts,
but it doesn’t, she said
and you remember
other waiting rooms,
pediatrician, orthodontist,
math tutor, ice rink,
the ER when she was five,
fell out of bed, and broke
her collar bone. The nurse
pulled you into the long corridor
so they could talk to her alone,
so they could make sure
it was not you
who had done the damage.

*

Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.

Waiting Room by Clara McLean

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Waiting Room

Let me be laminate, like the prototype pinned
to the wall at the doctor’s office, body glossed
in primary colors. Let captions speak clearly
for me, as for that flat man, organs outlined
in white balloons around him.
Make me a model for others to look to—
map of evident vessels uncovered to science
in lustrous, alive-looking branches.
Let me not be a problem,
a puzzle, pileup on the morning commute,
no discernible source and no exit.
All waiting here stare
at the horizon’s thin slit, sealed
in the distance, as though we might will it
to speak. Any breath, any answer
seems better than none, any wreck
we might tunnel toward,
the stunned aftermath we might finally
inch our way past,
peruse for our own lives within.
The specialist’s named
Dr. Paine, no joke, which reminds me of Crusher
on Star Trek. She had some kind of scanner
she’d wave over her patients’
abdomens. Just that, and their innards
would sing out their secrets.
Nothing unknown
in the light-zooming future.
No body beasted, animal
in a snap trap, fractured and thrashing
its dumbfounded hurt in a crawlspace,
pinned with no coat of miraculous
plastic, no words to speak with,
no admirable shine.

*

Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Terrain.org, Foglifter, Valparaiso Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, West Trestle Review, and The Comstock Review, among other publications, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her at claradmclean.com