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An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine Main Menu Foreword Introduction At the Teaching Hospital by Dan Kraines Atrophy by Paul Blom Barnacled to the Bone by Stephen C. Middleton Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes Choke by Alyson Miller Dead See Scroll by Rich Murphy Deciding Not to Wear Glasses by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Discovery: Negative Return by Tara Skurtu Exile by Lane Falcon Flush by Stephen Mead Fruit By Tyler Chadwick Grandmother Dead, Then Alive, Then Dead Again by Matthew Baker Hysteria by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee If Not Absolution by Matthew Baker Lack by Sarah Anderson Wood Mirena by Meagan Grant Mittelschmerz by Sarah Kersey Moon Child by Lisa Hiton pecan, rodef, clam by Susan Comninos Refugees by Walt Peterson She Cannot Let Him Go by Nancy Smiler Levinson Some Days Begin Like This by Tara Skurtu The Mechanics of Love by Victoria Gatehouse The Needle by Isla McKetta There Was Beauty in That Graph by Geralyn Pinto [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller Contributors

Biopsy

18022
by Julie Rosenzweig



The female staffer whose lack of a lab coat is supposed to
Sooth me, bids me disrobe from the waist up and lie
Down on this paper-coated slab. Arms folded across my
Chest like the corpse of a religion not my own, I inspect the curtain that
Carves out from this otherwise aseptic arena, a tomb or womb.
 
The color scheme that made a hectic headache of the waiting room
Has bled into this curtain, trail of an unstaunched wound.
Are those patterned swirls, flowers abstract enough to evoke
Something else entirely, swelling and sloping, someone's idea of a joke?
 
With no particular warning he breaches the billowy cloak,
Inserts hands, arranges, rearranges, pulls and pokes.
Head turned fastidiously aside, I'm reminded of the births I underwent but didn't see.
C-section or au naturel, how can you tell what's really going on with eyes
Screwed shut, pressure intense but sequestered, across a partition,
 
You but not you. Could it be helped, that sin of omission?
Don't worry, he says, it's just a benign condition,
But we knew that going in. Like gender, prescanned, preseen.
Tell me something I don’t know. They surprised me once with a
Redhead, telltale trail of sleeper genes,
Slow bleed of the past pooling beneath the skin.
Sleeping, we body forth what slumbered within. 

 

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