by
from Stories from the Infirmary.
©1999 by Carol Wierzbicki. Used with permission.
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by from Stories from the Infirmary. ©1999 by Carol Wierzbicki. Used with permission. |
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So I'm sitting behind this curtain
while John gets his spinal tap;
he says I'm the Wizard of Oz
but I feel more like Carol Merrill on
Let's Make a Deal:
You make John all better
and I'll give you my eternal gratitude.
Oh, I'm no good at dealmaking and
life lately has felt like some perverse
auction block,
everything uncertain,
the doctor sending unspoken signals
I don't know how to interpret.
The doctor is cheerful and kind
as he explains the procedure
but when he actually starts doing it,
he and the nurse lapse into
talking about movies
and as John says,
you know it's all over
when they start talking about movies.
I want to remind the doctor
there are two patients in the room,
one on either side
of the curtain.
What kind of levers and buttons
can I work
to guarantee John's recovery?
Of course it's all an illusion,
my stoicism,
my proactive question-asking.
I'm sitting in front of a control panel
but I don't like any of the selections.
Some Wizard.
Carol Wierzbicki has run poetry reading series in New York City and has been published in several poetry magazines, including Long Shot, The Café Review, Crimes of the Beats, and other anthologies. She makes her living editing a computing magazine. She belongs to the Unbearables, an irreverent group of poets. Her work is also in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999). Stories from the Infirmary, edited by Wierzbicki, is a collection of poetry and short prose in which eight writers, who are either living with chronic illness or are caregivers, share the experience of their daily round of suffering, hopes and fears.
Charlotte Brewster is an amateur, self-taught photographer whose experiments in black and white began when she was doing research in a tumor biology lab. She is currently based in New York City, where she works for a Web development company.
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