by Carrie George
I am worried because of everything my friend who got top surgery told me, but the doctor reassures me that this procedure is different. Haven’t I learned anything about comparing myself to others? I check in and fiddle with the plastic bracelet they give me. It irritates the thin skin on my wrist, where I am vulnerable and especially sensitive. I am led by a nurse to an operating table in the middle of a public park. Not to worry, she says, we will remember to draw the curtain. The word remember sticks out, as though privacy is conditional.
Everything is set to begin when a youth soccer team appears behind us. The children in their small uniforms begin running drills, kicking the ball back and forth and laughing. The coach explains to the doctor and I that they booked this field weeks ago, but they don’t mind sharing, as long as they don’t have to see any blood. What I’m more worried about, I want to say, is my stripped flesh, the unfolding of my skin among these families, these children, these boys. But it’s no longer my procedure. The doctor agrees to save the children from the sight of my blood. He remembers to draw the curtain, for their sake rather than mine, and begins working on me, slicing and sucking and stitching my unmoving body, splayed in the public dusk.
Carrie George is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is the graduate fellow at the Wick Poetry Center where she teaches poetry workshops throughout the community. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.