Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Clinical by Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum Clinical The doctor swans into the examination room in a white capsule of ennui, weary. The patient loosens her paper cover, attempts a smile through the bureaucratic crackle, naked except for the timid white cotton over shopworn breast and middle-aged belly. She points to her thigh: a speck that must be obvious to the dullest ignoramus is merely a dermatofibroma . . . . the doctor’s fingernail scratches a desultory red note on ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 After the Doctor's Call by Joan Mazza After the Doctor's Call She’s got the words stuck in her head, another song you can’t turn off, worse than It’s a small world after all. It’s a word string with a beat: metastatic pancreatic cancer. The tune plays over and over, written today for her father. It’s like that childhood jingle on black and white TV. You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. Finally sleep. ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Aria Dominguez Kally It is she whose palms welcomed me into this world, catching my bloody body, not dropping me. Thirty five years later, she phones to say my husband’s test results won't be in ‘til morning, but be ready to come to the hospital. It’s her weekend off, but she’ll watch for them, and will call. Before hanging up, a pause. I should know that one cause of this condition could ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Two Poems by Paul Hostovsky The Thing Is All the things that can go wrong with a body could fill a book. Lots of books. A whole medical library. But the thing is, there’s no point in naming them here. Names that are sometimes long and sometimes short, sometimes Greek and sometimes Latin. And sometimes the person who first noticed, studied, and isolated a thing that went wrong with a body ends up giving his ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Deborah Meltvedt Surfacing I’ve never seen a whale Do not be fooled by strangers or loved ones who say keep looking or this year will be different so I scan, squint into the horizon but waves mask spouts in high winds and rocks are not large mammals in the sea but you know they’re out there like cells the doctors missed when you slid beneath their scopes and held your breath hoping all of you not just ...

Poetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Three Poems by Uma Gowrishankar Compulsion I take an hour to wear shoes, Scrub my body All day with alcohol Until the skin burns. I tunnel through the years To the burrow of the circus. The trapeze artists weave from a bar To a bar and jump Into the net that bounces them To space again and again The way my father lifts the plate And places it once twice Until I take his hand and Lace his fingers with mine: Now both ...