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After the Doctor’s Call PSM 12 Poetry – Joan Mazza

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. ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Aria Dominguez

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 ...

Two Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Paul Hostovsky

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 ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Deborah Meltvedt

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 ...

Three Poems PSM 12 Poetry – Uma Growishankar

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 ...

Blue for Boy – Nkateko Masinga

Poetry Summer Supplement 2022 University of Iowa International Writing Program Africa Cohort 2021 September 26th, 2022 September 23, 2022 blue for boy by Nkateko Masinga blue for boy name given umbilical cord ligated ink drying on baby's birth certificate first cry pending apgar score: one baby not breathing normally panic news from neonatal intensive care unit: skin colour blue low muscle tone heart rate abnormal reflexes absent no effort at respiration ...

Collars of Worry – Ololade Ajayi

Poetry Summer Supplement 2022 University of Iowa International Writing Program Africa Cohort 2021 September 26th, 2022 Collars of Worry by Ololade Ajayi Collars of Worry Today is the day that I deny the god of sorrow a visa into my heart. In years past, it strolled in and took whatever possessions I held dear, so I drove around chasing the crumbs of happiness left in life. I got no affirmation, for even in the University of Life, I failed woefully in Grief 101, ...

This Side of My Skin – S Marie Watkins

Poetry Issue #10: Women's Health Mental Health Awareness Writing Contest Winner April 22nd, 2022 April 22nd, 2022 This Side of My Skin by S. Marie Watkins This Side of My Skin only shows a glimpse of me. Melanin speckles the ridge of my nose, the crest of my brow, the arch of my shoulders from crouching over a book. Parallel scars fade into ghosts forever haunting my arms, stomach, thighs, and ankles. Stretchmarks zigzag like lightning strikes and tear bolts down my hips. Most of these ...

Three Poems – Lake Angela

Poetry Issue #10: Women's Health April 22nd, 2022 April 22nd, 2022 Three Poems by Lake Angela The Women's Waltz —1— The day overwhelms us with insight into grey. The women survive. Their chins expand to stubblefields, and the furrows of their eyes draw closed. In their neglect, these bodies are left to love themselves. —2— In fitful sleep inside small cells, time recedes: ethyl-red dripped over flesh corrodes childhood dreams, drills drone and cigarettes singe grey skin thinned from years of rape locked in ...

Children’s Hospital – David Banach

Poetry Issue #10: Women's Health April 22nd, 2022 April 22nd, 2022 Children's Hospital by David Banach Children's Hospital My fingers gentle graze her pale and shaven head. A vise of six tapered insect legs keeps it immobile. Canvas smooth, her skin, a checkerboard of black, child-like hand-drawn lines, with electrodes embedded at the interstices, inscribed to map out paths of electric storm seizures. Myoclonic they said was the word to describe the clench of the body rolling forward, head banging against her plate on the table. I ...