American Life in Poetry
I’d guess that a number of our readers have had MRIs. One of my neighbors, a gravel hauler in rural Nebraska, told me that his test sounded as if he were on the inside of a corn sheller. Jackie Fox, also a Nebraskan, has a different take on the experience. Would you rather find yourself confined in a corn sheller or a dryer? It’s no wonder we call ourselves patients.
MRI
It thuds and clanks
like tennis shoes
in a dryer, only
I am the shoe,
sour, damp and
wedged into
the narrow
metal tube,
heart clanging.
American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2013 by Jackie Fox and reprinted from from Bellevue Literary Review, Volume 13, no. 2, Fall 2013, by permission of the author and the publisher. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.