Jessica Goody

DRAWING BLOOD

Listen to Audio Version.

The lab tech enters, bearing
a rattling tray of syringes and gauze.
The sharp scent of rubbing alcohol rises;
I feel the pinch and snap of the sterile
tourniquet cinching my flaccid bicep.
She slaps my arm, tenderizing the meat,
bruising the road-map curlicues of veins,
arteries and capillaries as fine as the stroke of
a blade. Blood wells brightly from the pinprick,
a swelling bead like a burst pomegranate seed,
the stinging needle draining the sap from my
scarred veins, filling tubes with its red pulse.

Jessica Goody writes for Sunsations Magazine and The Bluffton Today. Her work has also appeared in Barking Sycamores, Kaleidoscope, Spectrum, and Cyclamens and Swords. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Lucidity Poetry Journal International Competition and was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize Competition. Her poem "Stockings" recently won second place in the the 2015 Readers Digest Poetry Contest. Goody has written two volumes of poetry and several chapbooks, and is currently at work on her first novel.