
Iatrophobia
I don’t feel well
You’re impressive & have numerous degrees
You express a desire to make the world a better place
I fell down the stairs at the poetry reading
Because there is no cure for poetry, the words were heavy in my feet
the bone lost a part of itself & was suspended in irregularity
I am frequently characterized as irregular
I missed my period twice
I am on social assistance & have student loans
I’ve done sex work & associated with sex workers
You believed I was too lacking for children
I’ve been possessed by offspring
You could lullaby me to sleep, inspire unnatural dreams
You took my daughters while I was out
You are pro-choice but refuse to acknowledge how choices are loaded
You were present when my father turned into cancer
You hate sweets, offer me the glass jar of bitter sugarless candies
The factories closed so you sprung up shop in rural North America
Our doomed Niagara childhoods called to you
You stole my boyfriend when you gifted him oxycontin
You stole my best girlfriend when you named her crazy
as if a name is permanent & unchanging
You stole my boyfriend because you’re a doctor
The weakness of great men is often their performativity
Your realized-dream is noble in the current status quo
People say, “Did you hear? They are now a doctor!”
All you did was look over a clipboard before you were gone
Leaving the nurses to dirty their hands in the ethical murder of my father
You took off my pants to treat my strep throat
reached into my hairless eight-year-old cunt
I did not know this is what poems are made of
I was sexless in every way, even conceptually
My mother was watching & the door was open
In a place as safely irrelevant as Welland
You ask if I can pee myself on the table while you watch
You collect the pee in round containers & display them publicly
You require of me a plastic bag full of my feces
You sit me in stirrups & react with judgement
You grew up in a nice house on a nice street in a nice place
Your whole family is proud of you
You seem to have transcended something
The rich are more adept at recovery
Power corrupts as urgently as it empowers
You’ve been an unreliable witness to my fatness
My girlfriend is self-conscious about her Adam’s apple
You’re a little too keen to proclaim your allegiance to her body
You win prizes for treating human beings like human beings
You win prizes in general
You win prizes for epidemics
In the beginning, you always make me count my lovers for you
Romance & adventure are not taught in many classes on Biology
Much of aging is closely linked to perversion
You want to make sure I’m healthy
I cannot breathe underwater & have other limitations as well
The body is impermanent & prone to shapeshifting
There is a lot of pressure to make & keep making a lot of money
Outside your bedroom, your knowledge of bodies is limited
to cadavers, museums & pornography
You took me on a cruise with the rest of The Mayo Clinic
Their consciousness had textbook limitations, it was no fun
I suggested illness was another word for natural disaster
All were made uncomfortable by this grandiose assertion that contains plurality
no one stood on the bow to wonder at the black lake
& none of the surgeons were dancing
You never could find a meaningful simile for what you cut into & sterilize
There is a black hole in the photograph you took of my lungs
My heart is in the wrong place
I do not properly absorb sunlight
I love boys who are more likely to step on birds
You wore a suit & bought me an expensive drink
at the Fairmont Hotel
Your confidence was grounded in your ability to anatomize me correctly
Still, you penetrated me insufficiently
You sensed my disappointment but my blow jobs were well-practiced
so you let me keep the hotel pens & cbd capsules
Dying is an art like any other
My art is a failure
all of my suicides remain attempted-suicides
The notion of suicide goes against all that you stand for
You sensed I was in pain
& were supposed to heal me