Leah Claire Kaminski
Doctor's office with existential dread
Pap smear, period, polyps, rectocele, sensitivity. Pap smear, period, polyps, rectocele, sensitivity. Pap smear, period, polyps, rectocele, sensitivity. Pap
smear, period, polyps, rectocele, sensitivity. The Polish woman next to me looks unhappy, has a bad dye job, and works somewhere I imagine is a diner, given
her constraints when making an appointment, her comfortable shoes. She’s
pregnant like I was: third trimester and small, carrying high, wide-
hipped. Cuffed till my blood releases rushed and huffing, systolic outpour
and I’m in the bathroom reciting my concerns to myself and the pink urine cups
make me sob. My body my own container to fill when I want to be filled, with child or god, direction. Filling it with food instead. My life my own in pieces.
Thinking Henry, Henry every moment (but he is leaving me
by the minute). Last night I woke when he did and put him to bed scared and couldn’t
sleep thinking about when my father will die. This morning Henry confused
why he isn’t in our wedding pictures. Is unborn the same as dead. My father
hale, fat and happy before stroke took his color, his flesh. I have
no life in me but something roiling, rotting, wrong, something that’s only mine
absconding with something like time. Last night a dream of a man: he
has a name—his boyhood’s—and I must not use it. He was my love
but we did not touch, floated together through streets tender with scent,
layered with ache. In the exam room, cold and coffined in paper, my tears slip
onto the metal table. I think he was my brother. Damien I think you returned to me, the
person who taught me dead, prepared me for you dead, you’d held my hand, swung me
at Wilson Park, across Milwaukee from the funeral home where Grandma’s body
exhaled into ash, six weeks before you were killed. Once, drunk
at a wedding near Kenosha, I cornered a doctor, pressed him into telling me
you died instantly. The next morning, I realized he never really said it and now
I imagine your few seconds of pain and I do not cradle your fourteen-year-old body
in my arms. To hold that ghost of pain in my arms now. My muscles hold it
until I dissolve and the doctor comes in, reconfigures me, she
is kind with beautiful crow’s feet, soft powdery skin like the world’s grandmother.
We talk pap smear, period, polyps, rectocele, sensitivity. Is the world my
grandmother. We pass the cemetery daily and daily Henry says remember when the bus
hit me? And it went crash and I died and I went up to the stars. He doesn’t understand
tense. I cannot leave the past or the future, which pull at me
with tendoned tender strings, embodied with me, we move with each other’s impulses
and I begin to bleed when she removes the speculum, cold mouth gnawing my
inside flesh, then I’m staring at my blood in a cup, and I’m remembering
to ask myself what is this. Uncurling hand of don’t know, supplicant
to the wind, what fills this bowl of my body but
blood, shit, and the ghosts of pain.
Leah Claire Kaminski's poems can be found in Bennington Review, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, and Zyzzyva. She’s the author of three chapbooks. Poetry editor at The Dodge and editorial assistant at Seneca Review, Leah lives in Chicago. Find out more at www.leahkaminski.com.