Lung Biopsy
By Paula Praeger
From my left breast
a tube,
branchlike,
grows down,
a weeping willow
clinging to the bark of my skin.
My jailor, an air-sucking machine,
on the floor beside my bed
traps me,
its numbered, diagrammatic face
the wall of my cell,
its small aqua window,
bubbling water
to drown in
as air blocks
full-lung inflation.
In blue-green water, I raft
belly down from hospital hell,
to the melody of doctor’s lyric,
“discharged.”
In my dark lung-earth,
nodules, pink, poisonous,
root and grow,
sing “radiation”
like a choir of mushrooms
in a dollhouse-sized forest.
I peer down my chest.
Does havoc linger?
I see only the innocence
of a tiny scab.
Paula Praeger is an artist who began reading and writing poetry in September 2019. She took a poetry class and realized that poetry, like visual art, paints images. Paula writes about people and events in her life and medical issues, some of which have been grave and life threatening. Her prints contain her complete poem or the title, or one or more words or stanzas. That Was The Winter was published in the virtual portfolio Hindsight in February 2021. Morning Walks II will be published in the Visible Ink Anthology later this year. Paula lives in New York