Kristin LaFollette
I Wrote a High School English Paper on Hand Surgery
I was going to be a surgeon once—
When you’re 17 years old,
anesthesia smells like paper,
a cellar after a flood
(old water mixed with mud and glass jars)—
At 17 years old, I wrote about how to be a surgeon
with post-operative skin, a once-moving joint
fused
with metals and glue,
wrote about wrapping
surgical
instruments with colored
foam like I did with
writing utensils—
As a 17-year-old, I stood on a stepstool
in an operating room, watched staples
inserted into skin, smelled bone dust
and cauterized fat, listened to
someone recite the details of knee
replacement surgery
When blood was on my hands, I held them
close to my face, smelled the familiar smell
of wet fabric, the movement of cells collecting
oxygen
The insides of bones are soft, easy to burrow into
An x-ray of my marrow showed the intricate
pieces that hold me together—
I wanted to tell everyone I would be a doctor—
the kind with foam-covered
pencils and soft bones
Kristin LaFollette is a PhD candidate at Bowling Green State University and is a writer, artist, and photographer. She is the author of the chapbook Body Parts (GFT Press, 2018) and has had her writing featured in the anthologies Ohio’s Best Emerging Poets (2017) and America’s Emerging Poets 2018: Midwest Region. You can visit her on Twitter at @k_lafollette03 on her website at kristinlafollette.com.
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