Just as all of us eventually become patients, so too do the ways we experience diagnosis share common elements. The poets here have conjured a variety of figures representing how we may proceed from experiencing symptoms, to getting diagnosed, to struggling with various maladies—whether temporary or permanently life altering. Here you will find images of embarking on an uncertain journey, of navigating with an imperfect compass, of being caught in a darkened room when a startling light switches abruptly on, and of being trapped in a castle under siege—among many more imaginative renderings that add depth of insight and feeling to our theme of diagnosis.

In “Magnetic North” Dagne Forrest travels the unsettling terrain of having symptoms that elude easy diagnosis: “the truth it seems, like me, is as restless as the earth’s / magnetic north pole, constantly / in motion, never quite / where we expect it to be  / Changing course, tilting away.”

In “Exam Rooms Often Have No Windows,” Amy Haddad describes the suffocating fear of waiting for test results: “Blackness thick as felt / envelops us. We fumble in the dark  / to reach each other. As soon as we move,  / the lights snap on. Perhaps the lights  / sense the bad news from the biopsy . . . .”

When we feel the body has failed us, we experience a sense of distortion and disorientation. In “After the Doctor’s Call,” Joan Mazza writes:  “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.” Her speaker  “dreams of a meat counter / in an organic market where they sell exactly / what she wishes, human organs clean and fresh, / packaged with their kind: liver, pancreas, lung. / She loads her cart with every type” –only to realize she has lost her wallet.

Several poets explore the feeling of transformed personal identity accompanying a diagnosis of life altering impact. Dagne Forrest says,  “A sense of division / defines this new landscape, the Before and After me.” Rebekah Bartlett’s speaker in “Automata” laments a chilling new awareness brought on by a heart condition: “And now it’s breaking, I see / it was not mine to command / Was never a heart of sighs and words / but a clockwork, timebound and / fit only for mechanics.” In “My Apartment” Bartlett laments how disabling, chronic pain has changed her life, with the image of her apartment reduced to a square that confines and limits her: “A square for the walks / I no longer take / A square for the pictures / I no longer make / A square for the stars / My only view / A square for tomorrow / And the days after too.”

And yet amid the darkness and pain, we can take solace from the courage and determination of these writers to be seen as more than the sum of their symptoms, exemplified by Deborah Meltvedt in “Surfacing”:  “you slid beneath their scopes / and held your breath / hoping all of you / not just the spots / will still be seen.” And while the speaker in Mary Birnbaum’s “Diagnosis” registers for us the dehumanizing feeling of being treated with dismissive disdain by a doctor examining a spot on her thigh, we understand this is a negative example that establishes a higher standard for the care we have a right to expect: “this is nothing he says / without a glance at her face, idiot, like a panicky / cow, a woman without medical interest.” Contrasting with such callousness is the doctor seen in Aria Dominguez’s “Kally,” and the paramedic in Joe Amaral’s, “Make the Call,” who takes on the heartfelt responsibility of guiding a family through the necessary final procedures when their father has passed, “Reaching over, I turn off the heart monitor. / I’m sorry for your loss.”

You will also find in these pages, the care and comfort provided by family members, who also bear the heavy weight of their loved ones’ diagnoses and their aftermath.  Particularly poignant is Uma Growishankar’s concern for her father’s failing health: “You wear black, rest like fractured old wood / on the migraine flare which flames your body. / I gather your feet to trace the rings of age, sluices / of calcium whorled in volcanic blooms. . . .You and I / pack grief in Samsonite. As I haul the suitcase / into the car, I cannot say what weighs more— / all that you carry or that you leave behind.”

By engaging with the writers of this Winter Issue, may you be fortified to face bravely the critical health issues we can experience in a lifetime. May you find strength in these lines by Joe Amaral, who has seen not only the vulnerability of his patients but also their remarkable recoveries, for “like fractures / and heart attacks some human vehicles recover with their own determination / and mechanized modern medicine / that coils the maybe no longer shiny / but strong, stubborn, and stalwart / reverberating human beast.”  Touched and bolstered by each life represented in this issue, so acutely imagined and preciously valued, may you, like Dagne Forrest’s speaker, find peace and consolation in acceptance:

and now that I’m here

this is the path I must walk.

–Steve Granzyk, Poetry Editor

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.