Editor’s note: This spring, Health Affairs held its first ever poetry contest. Three winning poems were published in the journal. We’re also featuring some of our other favorites on the Blog throughout the month of October.
Medicine
Sundays after church, he puts on
the same pants, same wide brim hat,
unlocks the backyard shed –
each number of the combination
a birthday of a family member –
and sets out to cure his cancer.
He mows in scalpel clean incisions,
around the belly of his pool, up
along the side of his house,
straight back to where his property
touches his neighbors’ and back
again.
At the hospital, his doctors examined
his test results. All they could do
was wish him luck.
This procedure takes three hours, never
less, to cover the humble yard, smallest
in the master planned community. He stops
the engine to check for unevenness, gets
on his knees. To overlook a single piece of grass
would be a catastrophe.
-Michael Mark
Cost of Living
The wagons are circled,
Twenty-six chemo chairs.
We face the walls
And contemplate mortality.
Forty-two-thousand-dollars per
Three-week infusion.
Some are cheaper. The weekly treatments
Are only twenty-four-thousand.
Every chair in use, three shifts a day.
The nurse teaches us about pee.
Lower the lid before you flush —
Don’t contaminate your husband’s toothbrush.
Nevermind the frogs downstream,
Four legged cousins, your fishy friends.
You just sleep now. Sleep.
I dream:
If I am very lucky, there will be an evening
Where the robins weave a web of calls,
And the fragrance of warmed petals lifts me off my feet.
I’ll hardly notice the frogs not croaking.
-Erica Sternin
What Doctors Say
When he calls you expect him to say
“Everything looks fine.” Instead
your friend, a radiologist, asks
“What’s going on with you?”
Another doctor shows you
grainy images; you don’t see anything
but black and gray blotches
without the Rorschach symmetry.
They decide to take the blotches out.
While you recover, lazing with dogs
in afternoon sunshine, this one calls.
Her message doesn’t say
“Everything looks great!”
Instead, “I’d like to discuss the results
of your pathology.” You call back
immediately. They’re closed ’til morning.
You dial at precisely 8:00 and leave a message,
take the kids to school, go about your day.
By closing time, no word.
You’re talking to your wife across five states
when the call comes. Her words blur
like hummingbird wings, only flashes of color
at the throat and the delicate, deadly beak:
only the words rare and cancer reverberate.
You’re 38 and must decide which parts
of yourself you want to keep. Suddenly
you can’t drive kids to school. Your mom
flies in, becomes a machine of cooking,
dishes, laundry. Slowly, you heal.
If luck continues, you’ll become intimate
bedfellows with screenings and invasive exams
for decades stretching out before you.
Outside the hospital, birds squabble,
tussle in the undergrowth and one by one
flit away in pursuit of that singular desire
spring has awakened in them.
-Elyse Arring
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