1.

What the body is doing
is what we’re always after.

I feel the transience of my health like I am being waited out:
each hotline I called gave a different answer.

In the waiting room, I read an article in which the journalist spends a lot of time
getting to the heart of the actor’s “bad girl” persona.

While the nurse takes my temperature, I’m running down a tally of all the things
that can’t be taken.

The nurse tech must reach an arm blindly over her cart in order to set the blood-
ox monitor. Says, Don’t worry, the doctor will do the exam, she is a professional.

In the art on the walls, a Cape Cod scene, white heron, cranberry bog, scrub oak in the distance:
the heart of dune country. The only colors: mint, lime, rust, white, rust, oxblood.















2.

I want the dignity of a well visit:
I sit in the corner of my appointment—not on the table.

Too close to hold the hand of my doctor-figure:
she is a hive my body is folded over—lashes, brows, a squint of mouth.

Look across my own diseased lap, at her, at the blinking arrow.
I feel her impatience, the noise of her thinking, a lukewarm breeze.

The oximeter doesn’t confess anything it doesn’t know
though there is an abundance.

This is how healing happens: I open my mouth
then swallow.















4.

It’s true that I don’t trust my body anymore. I’ve read the research, looked up billing codes:
the professionals can only discover so much ill.

I want to keep me alive, but a good girl is to want not
to upset the doctor-figure.

Listed, the verbs are: will do, check, will exam, declines, will consider, discussed, reconciled, expresses—
every verb is a lesson in longing or dread.

She said, If you’re so upset about your illness . . . 
while I bend to scrub my blood from the floor.

This was a form of aggression I didn’t recognize
right away, shocked as I am by the contrast of the dark red on the white lino.

There isn’t much to look at—just scrub
oak, cranberries, a photo of the dunes—in my examination room.

But complicated marshes exist
below the clinic’s cripple studs. I mean, a nest.

I mean, the point is to not be found
vulnerable.















5.

I try not to think
of what the doctor-figure calls my Problem List.

The paper pulp Summary of My Visit grows softer for all my unfolding. I want proof
of what marred me, codes of care disparity, roots of my punishing: Paging Dr. Strong.

I drove six hours back to New York through the slip of land in Truro where
sand moved at top speed above the pain of my disorientation in a place I once knew well.

What feels like a black hedgerow is really the thickness of the marshland I always hit
before I arrive at the dunes. Black marks on the sky like a sentence, a warning.

Now, I hear a team of traumas drawing the body down. A team of traumas wants to hear its name.
Total face-to-face time greater than twenty-five minutes.

This is the word-of-mouth story of record. Thirteen faxes to Enrollment I pray
were preventable. A hold for the body like water, I pray, when this system pushes back and wins.