Iatrophobia

I don't feel well

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

About the author

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, recently named a Rising Star (2023) by the Writers' Trust of Canada and to the Niagara Region's Top 40 Under 40. She has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and awarded the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize and Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing. Mannell taught creative writing at George Brown College, and was an acquisitions editor at Dundurn Press, where she spearheaded their literary imprint Rare Machines. She lives in Welland, Ontario.