Two weeks ago I noticed my left leg was a little swollen, a trip to the ER, two CAT scans, one X-ray, an MRI, and several sonograms later I'm scheduled for surgery to remove a sizable ovarian cyst. Navigating in-network tests and care amongst an array of often unconnected doctors has been difficult. But even wait and worry, novelty and reaction are material. Thought I'd start posting the poems and sketches these difficult weeks have evoked.
Waiting In a Boring Place, 2 Haiku
Time is a sail boat
Tacking against plodding fog
No flags flutter now
Flecked linoleum
Ceiling tiles pitted as moons
Words flattened on page
Lost at Sea
We are the women who pace the square deck
of weather beaten worry, squinting,
the clouds disoblige our eyes—
dirty, spitting, parting, gripping as hard
as the babies left to us to raise.
Neither widows nor orphans
we wait, hearts screwed to our spines
or the puppet-like limbs of children
too young to know the dry rot of loss.
Fear is the gull or the loosened smock
scuttling over spume and debris
refusing to reveal damp divinations.
Once he kissed us against that tree
everything was supple then, in another spring.
First MRI
There’s a swarm in the tunnel
I’m the branch they try to land on
a wind of reckoning keeps us apart
close my eyes and the bees
are hived for winter
shivering around the honey
stillness in the roar
the hum is louder than think…
I watch bees pulse in and out of clover
it could be summer again,
I could be well.
First MRI
There’s a swarm in the tunnel
I’m the branch they try to land on
a wind of reckoning keeps us apart
close my eyes and the bees
are hived for winter
shivering around the honey
stillness in the roar
the hum is louder than think…
I watch bees pulse in and out of clover
it could be summer again,
I could be well.
© 2014 Claudia Carlson, do not use without permission.
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