Waiting for the geneticist to call

the uber misses a turn, the app adding ten minutes to my pickup time. Traffic’s unusually trafficky around Prospect Park and I’m my usual panicked plus the panic of possible positive finding, which may or may not be panickier than the panic of a negative. I’ve been waiting a long time for this uber and fuck for these results, just sitting in my building lobby trying to get to my IV clinic where others get chemo but I get – thankgod – only saline.

My neighbor’s perched outside the lobby on the little metal fence installed to prevent dogs from peeing on the flowers, chain-smoking after his shift as at the Brooklyn Hospital Center. His socks are polka-dot, his neck tattooed. He was active duty after 9/11. He’s now a pediatric and neonatal cardiology resident. Yesterday he told me he’s pro-life. 

We all know the thing about babies dying without physical contact. Goddamn this uber is slow and I’ve been waiting for so long to know why my muscles seize when I’m touched. The resident tried to shake my hand and I laughed, stumbled for a nonsense explanation for the nonsense why I can’t accept this singularly human greeting.

Suffering is less and less interesting the more it’s suffered. Upon workshopping this poem for the first time, a reader expressed curiosity at this impossibly metaphoric condition – how did I think of it? – until noticing my crooked smile. I could never be so creative.

At sixteen I volunteered at the local children’s hospital. I felt awkward playing games with sick kids who could talk so I opted for the baby ward. They needed proxy mothers to hold them when their own couldn’t or wouldn’t. Four or more to a room, all on ventilators. 

Once I held one with no ears. He was adorable. I don’t know if he could hear me whisper the ABCs. He looked like a little minnow in his shielded crib, floating immobile-y in a dried-up sea.

When the call comes nothing will change. The geneticist’s words won’t make the uber come faster or let me hug a lover without seizing. I want an answer, but answer does not beget cure. Or even care. We want less suffering and pain. We want the air warmer and the water softer. We want our babies with ears and our poems slick metaphors for love.

Even if she never calls I’ll still go outside and stand in the sun, at least until my legs start to shake. A shaking from stillness, not light. 

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I didn’t hit my head and I kept not hitting it
I stayed quiet and followed the rules.
I rested in my whiteness
and when Jewishness interfered
I asked the four questions at Passover
in Hebrew, the first time at 32

ok I lied it was half of one question
and only reading the transliteration,
which is the closest we’ll ever come
to anything anyway

I’ve been avoiding tenderness and learned
I’m very good at it.

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remember when alice made us listen to babies crying

remember in anne carson’s class when that girl made a bonkers performance piece that would’ve been successful if a parody but it was not a parody, she wore all black and tried to light all the candles but none of it was working which was honestly a really good show but it wasn’t the show she’d imagined, that’s what this is, here

my doctor just gave me a list of high histamine foods to avoid

i’ve always thought these lists were neoliberal but maybe she really is just trying to help