Because We Don’t Entirely Trust Doctors​

Issue 12

Seventeen days. That's when I will have
told him I scheduled the appointment. It's a goal.

I say 17 because I relish how it sounds,
savor its dissolve on my tongue. Hour surpassing

hour, passing quietly as my mother.
Without pain. Without anyone knowing why.

We speak of growing older as if it were already ours.
Like we can sit it on the examining room table.

Undress it. Open its mouth and tell it to say ah. Stick
a lifetime down its throat. Like it won't be swallowed whole.

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Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, a disabled GenX author, whose recent poetry appears in ONE ART, Miracle Monocle, Southern Quill, BigCityLit, Haiku Canada, and Panoply. She earned awards through the Nonfiction Authors Association, Poetry Society of Virginia, Virginia Writers Club, Loudoun County Library, Prince William County, City of Manassas, and more.

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