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 this failure

of the ordinary.  This is nothing, he says
without a glance at her face, idiot, like a panicky

cow, a woman without medical interest.
The door closes with that tiny snick.

Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She has studied poetry at the Joiner Institute in UMass, Boston. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019 as well. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, J-Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, and Barrow Street.