“There shouldn’t be any pain today,”
she said, pushing her glasses
up the bridge of her nose and flicking
through paperwork on her clipboard.
That’s good, I said, trying to get comfortable
being mostly naked
in front of a complete stranger.
There shouldn’t be any pain today,
but I walked in with swollen joints
and a shoulder that won’t move.
I’m already in pain.
There shouldn’t be any pain today,
but as I let her poke and prod
that frozen shoulder, it comes anyway.
I tell her it hurts.
“Well, you are pretty tight.”
So, I press my lips together
and think about children starving
in some foreign country, my own country,
and how those pictures of babies with swollen
bellies and flies buzzing around
make me feel guilty;
about moms who never get filled
Christmas stockings or time to themselves
and how they have to go back to work
mere days after giving birth
and how their children take all that in;
about elections and gender identity
and church trauma and sin
and that secret that I’ve never told
but feels like a perpetual purple bruise
on the inside of my right thigh.
There shouldn’t be any pain today.
But I think about people dying in Palestine
and Ukraine and the ghastly number of school
shootings that happen every year
and I hurt.
“Where, exactly, does it hurt?” she asks
and I think about a poem I read somewhere
that asks the earth where it hurts
and the earth whispers
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
But I don’t know this person,
and she just wants to know about my shoulder.
So, I unpress my lips and tell her,
exactly, where I’m having pain
in my shoulder and how lightning strikes
sizzle up and down my arm,
into my neck, traveling down my back,
dazzling me with the amount of
sparkling pain that can take over
one area of the body.
I don’t mention anything else.
She doesn’t need to see my bleeding heart
for all the things that make me feel useless
spread out before her on her
physical therapy table.
***
The poem referenced in my poem can be found here.
Sarah Stoltzfus Allen 