Diorama (a moment with the doctor)

← v18n2, Fall 2019

The story needs to get going.

He picks up one of the smoky vials on the shelf.

He isn’t motivated solely by wanting to control the blonde girl.

He gives other people chemicals he doesn’t understand,

takes some himself.

On his pre-dawn walk, the doctor diagnoses himself

with having a heart like a trellis.

He asks that you don’t laugh at him

as he stands on the night-wet sand to undress.

He never wanted this moment to be recorded.

The water is dangerously cold. The morning is still

except for the low murmur of narration.

He wishes he could be like the other townspeople

and refuse to create names for the crimes he wants to keep committing.

Sarah, Jane? Behind him,

He’s in the water now, up to his chest.

He lifts his feet.

desire body myth

Catie Rosemurgy

Catie Rosemurgy’s second poetry collection, The Stranger Manual , is forthcoming in January 2010 from Graywolf Press. Her first collection, My Favorite Apocalypse , was published by Graywolf Press in 2001. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for Emerging Female Writers. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Young American Poets and Poetry 30 , a collection of work by American poets in their thirties. She teaches at the College of New Jersey.