Liz Whiteacre
YET ANOTHER REFERRAL
This next diagnosis could cut me.
Like the seven-inch chef’s knife,
bayonet, shiv, oyster knife,
each diagnosis has been different.
Today, I hope it’s quick, leaves
a clean cut, one mended swiftly
—not the bread knife’s zigzag
or the machete’s frenzied slash.
I hope this doctor will have
concoctions I can massage
on the wound or, even better,
a pill. I hope, in a perfect
moment, I won’t be cut at all:
this diagnosis might arch,
strike air—all my time fretting,
a benign mistake.
Funny, it’s never a Seax—
never a diagnosis
romantic, mystical, godly.
I don’t dare name these blades
like old warriors named
swords—a familiar Betty
or William would fester.
No, I prefer them über
pragmatic, utilitarian, unknown.
Though I anticipate attack
in this plastic office,
like a mugger’s knife
in a desolate alley,
it still shocks. I don’t want
to be cut, and my pain,
its ache, its echo, leaves
stains on each blade
I cannot wipe clean.
* * *
SHOALING IN TOWN
Lifeguards arrive bedazzled for dinner and dancing with two feeder goldfish.
“The bowl needs a plant,” says Jess, “I told them we should have gotten a plant.”
Kristy picks up a polished Petoskey stone my dad gave me and gentles it
on the bowl’s bottom. “Perfect,” she says, resting the bowl by my loveseat.
“They’ll keep you company until you get back to work,” Jenny says.
And we leave, me crutching behind the girls, locking the door.
Sweaty and dark is this bar—I watch them shimmer, and they bring me
fruity cocktails with umbrellas, bounce back to tell me stories of men
they dance with to keep me from feeling lonely like, perhaps, the goldfish
in the bowl on my table, circling, staring at all my distorted stuff,
pissed they’ve downgraded—no more leafy plastic plants, bright pebbles,
pirate ships or deep sea divers—a flashy paradise where they got to meet
new roommates each week as friends went home with strangers.
When Jenny, bored and sober, rounds up the lifeguards, we pile in her clunker.
They drop me off to a dark apartment, a dead fish.
I scoop it out of the bowl, lamely one-crutch it, limp in a slotted pasta spoon,
to the bathroom and flush. It’s sobering to see its little body rise
then sink with the current. I eye the fish left: black, orange, blue, purple,
white and perky, bobbing in conditioned water with the spotted rock
and promise it I will make things better—as soon as I can get somebody
to drive me to the pet store. I name him Skeeter, and we doze in starlight
—he hovers while I moor myself to the sofa, liquor and pills dulling the pain.
We float together. Keep vigil for the unnamed dead.
Liz Whiteacre teaches creative writing at Ball State University. She is the author
of Hit the Ground (Finishing Line Press)
and co-editor of the anthology
Monday Coffee & Other Stories of Mothering Children with Special Needs (INwords Press). Her poems have appeared in Wordgathering,
Disability Studies Quarterly, The Healing Muse, Breath and Shadow, and other magazines.
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