May 24, 2013
At the Next Hospital
My body
still hurts.
Will the doctors
know me?
Two ailments.
Editor’s Note: I admire the poem for its spareness, for the way the sadness of the pain of the body is simple and blunt like the wish to be known. It feels beleaguered, hollowed from impersonality. The loose ends of clues are as unlikely to lead anywhere as the exhausted thoughts of a patient. The poem really does feel like being a patient in too many hospitals. —Adam Plunkett
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By Joshua Weiner
Joshua Weiner is professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author most recently of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, from the University of Chicago Press.
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