POETRY

Minor Procedure When We Thought the Worst Was Over

By Brandi Nicole Martin     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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Tableside, there’s fine silver
as if the room awaits dinner

while off-screen, surgeons robe
like priests, their regalia papery,

their palms aloft as if the men
will worship me. Gloves,

God’s smallest blessings,
are offered and received.

We enter from opposite sides--
the doctors’ awful sync,

me gurney-pushed, already
asleep, and I don’t rouse

when they lift me on a sheet
like I’m a sluggish lump of meat,

and I don’t rouse when, tenderly,
they spread my arms like wings.

The end, if you’re dumb enough
to believe that sort of thing.

I was.
I would’ve liked a warning.


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BRANDI NICOLE MARTIN is a writer with disabilities whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and Willow Springs, among others. Her creative nonfiction has previously appeared in Boulevard. She was a runner-up for the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize from Missouri Review and an honorable mention for the 2023 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest. She holds a PhD from Florida State University, and she is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Auburn University.


VOLUME 57 No. 4