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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 Biopsy by Julie Rosenzweig Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes Choke by Alyson Miller Dead See Scroll by Rich Murphy 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

Deciding Not to Wear Glasses

18022
by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee



My eyes work double time—
presbyopia, myopia. The
afternoon blurs into real
time. What’s far becomes
near. What’s near, far.
The horizon is a haze of definitions.
Middle age, middle ground.
As much ahead as behind.
I rely on memory. How
much the mind informs
what surrounds it! The
ophthalmologist explains how
the brain adjusts the
picture. But I can feel the lens
adjusting—one moment it’s fuzzy;
the next, clear. And what I
thought I saw now is not
at all correct, but corrected.
It’s true. The object was a sharp
image on the retina at seventeen.
Now I juggle pictures
to find one that resembles
what I see. In a different city,
the signs point in all directions
with streets I’ve never known.
I search for meaning. I search
for the way—one that’s
easy, one that’s clear.

 

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