Honorable Mention: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
I don’t hear the doctor at first
when she asks if I’ve been sleeping
better these nights, if I’ve cut back
on the raw fish, if the migraines
have subsided, because my mind
is gridlocked, caught between some weight
and height on the BMI chart
tacked on the wall of her office,
as if my body were hanging
there too.
That’s when I remember
some random bit of trivia,
how the first body mass index
was based on the weights of corpses,
and I laugh at the irony,
how all these years I’ve been striving
to be as fit as a dead man,
controlling portions, passing on
seconds or dessert, forgetting
how much I loved my wife’s brownies,
when she would dump an extra cup
of walnuts into the batter
because she knew I loved the crunch,
when we’d clear dishes together,
clean up our kitchen messes, those
memories so near, I try to
close my eyes around them, savor
my daily allowance of loss
as I try to get back those years
before that disappearing trick,
before I became a walking
cadaver.
I’m snapped back into
reality when the doctor
presses the stethoscope against
my skin, tells me to breathe, as though
I haven’t been. She asks again
if I’ve been sleeping more soundly
as she slides the cold drum across
the smooth map of my heart, tells me
to breathe deep, and again, and now
to just breathe normally, as if
that request were simple, as if
I have been overthinking it
these last few years, as if my lungs
hadn’t been at work all the while,
toiling against their master’s will.
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in such venues as The Hollins Critic, Ninth Letter, Philadelphia Stories, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.