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Poem

"Where does it hurt?"
she asks, clipboard like a shield,
pen cocked like a firing pin.
"Here," I say,
pointing to the silence just beneath my ribcage.
Not the lungs. Not the liver.
The place where sorrow goes to calcify.

They send me down long corridors,
all white noise and flickering fluorescents—
like memory on a bad day.
I wear a gown that opens in the back,
like every conversation I regret.

Inside the machine,
I lie still as a kept secret.
The MRI growls like an old god,
searching my insides
for evidence of war crimes.

I think about the shrapnel—
not metal, but moments.
The look she gave me
the night everything broke,
like she was already ghosting
through the wreckage of my voice.

I tell the technician:
It’s there. I can feel it.
Each breath razors against it.
But the scan is clean.
No foreign objects. No narrative.

They call it “psychosomatic”
like it’s a compliment,
like my body is staging a play
my mind refuses to direct.

Back in the doctor's office,
she says, "There's nothing inside you."
And I laugh—sharp and wrong.
Isn't that what pain is?
The something that feels like everything
and shows up as nothing?

I ask if she can x-ray a metaphor.
She doesn’t smile.
Just types and nods and offers
a pamphlet on stress management
as if I haven't already built
cathedrals from my coping mechanisms.

I leave with no diagnosis—
just a quiet war still raging
beneath my skin.
A soldier in peacetime,
saluting ghosts
that never made it
into the file.

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