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The Seven-Year Night:
Poems of the Medical
Training Experience
by James S. Wilk
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Excerpts
For Rachel
I wasn’t there. But I dropped
my stethoscope when I heard
of the aftermath: your delicate, naked
frame hospital-gowned in blue, the plastic
breathing tube taped to your ashen lips,
that worm-like IV burrowed in your groin,
the blood within it burgundy and motionless
as the spoonful of urine in the catheter.
Your concave chest matched
your sunken eyes and scaphoid abdomen
until you were hollow, an empty canoe,
floating somewhere downstream,
beyond all memory of food,
west into the September dusk.
A Bezoar
During surgery, we found a bezoar
blocking her bowels.
I asked her afterwards
what she’d been eating.
“I took every photo I had
of that bastard, shredded them,
and boiled the scraps until
it looked like oatmeal.
I figured it was high in fiber
and ate it all, hoping to shit
twenty years out of my system.”
Hyperemesis Gravidarum
Her jeans no longer hugged her bony frame;
emaciated, sunken cheeks and eyes
betrayed a face once worthy of her name—
Venus—a goddess starved and undersize.
The dark line and revealing little bulge
which grew above her waist gave subtle clues.
The ceaseless morning sickness, though, divulged
her pregnancy, despite her senseless ruse.
Six months the girl endured her Calvary
of sepsis, needles, bruises, blood clots, pain.
all complications of technology
and artificial nourishment by vein.
Six months the girl endured her crown of thorns
to save a child she’d hoped would not be born.
Purchase The Seven-Year Night here Big Table Publishing.
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