Anesthesia Awareness
three times cut open: four items removed
a boy, then twins: a girl and boy, then
a length of intestine: three separate
procedures: in one of them rendered
merely still save for her toes: which she
could wiggle and did: it’s going on
twenty years she’s been gone: how she took it
how a woman is: dismissed: that no
one remembers: which it was
This poem was originally published in Five Points Journal
Poet and critic Austin Segrest is the author of Door to Remain (UNT Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. His poems can be found in Poetry, The Common, Ecotone, The Threepenny Review, and many others. He was a 2018-19 poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Born and raised in Alabama, Austin teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
Mr. Segrest can be reached at http://austinsegrest.com
I love the way the poet sets the tone in the first line. The tone suggests that the patient may not have been treated as “humanely” as she should have been. The description is dry and objective. “Three times cut open: four items removed” Perhaps the medical teams should have recognized the movement in her toes , which likely signaled a lack of adequate sedation. It seems like the poem serves to pay homage to… Read more »