antiBODY
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 Biopsy by Julie Rosenzweig Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes 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

Choke

18022
by Alyson Miller



It started with stomach flu, your body leached crackle-dry. A night and day of heaving, crouched before the porcelain neck of the toilet as acid burns your throat raw, bleaches the calcium from your teeth. The smell of rot and sweat perspire from hot skin during the horror of choking as stomach and mouth rush to empty, the contractions echoing a guttural lament down the hallway. In the hours before morning, pulse thrashing like trapped fish and convinced something alien is attempting birth from your chest, you ask me to Google symptoms of cardiac arrest, cardiopulmonary failure and, to be sure, indigestion. In the ER, imaging reveals only a fissure, a rib-torn muscle that will soon knit bone-tight. On leaving, the streets vacant with that brief desolation of night and heavy with petrichor, we talk of magnetic fields and radio waves, the intimacy between gut and heart, and the impossible magnetics of hydrogen atoms.
 

 

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