John A. Vanek
St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
Poet’s statement: I am a physician by training, but a poet by passion. Poetry provides a vehicle that takes me to places that logic won’t go. It is a way of understanding the incomprehensible, both in life and in medicine. I now prescribe poetry PRN (“as needed”), but warn that it may hurt a little. My poems are peopled with my family, friends, and patients. “Another Found Poem” is based on a real event from my internship, and “Anatomy of Love” is simply a flight of fantasy.
Another Found PoemChristmas lights of red and green twinkle on the monitor, flash pulse and pressure, proclaim the baby in this crib will live for now. My gloved hand hovers above the only vein on his hairless scalp, ‘til the butterfly needle finds courage to land, and I tape the tube to sallow skin that wants to tear away. Blue fingers fist with the whoosh of each breath, as bellows fan this fading ember—a warm blanket and a mother’s sleepless song, gifts for the newborn child. She huddles with her husband as if cold, his blue blazer now her shawl, limbs and lives entwined, nestled forehead to forehead, exchanging a dialysis of toxic hope. I want nothing more than the sleep of a silent night filled with dreams of places other than here, heedless of her cradlesong. In this strawless manger of sorrow, below a fluorescent star, I wonder how to tell this couple the baby they never could bear will be gone by New Year’s. I fiddle with knobs, gauge how much they understand, snatch glances meant for each other, stare at my blood-spattered shoes, then tell them— and all is lost but these words and the haunting hum of a mother’s never-ending lullaby. |
Anatomy of LoveWhen I say I “love” you, I mean the moonlight dancing across your hair reflects from the mirror that is you in splendid full light spectrum, and your rainbow beauty is focused by lenses onto my retinas, then carried like a bride across the threshold of the optic nerves, overloading my neural network like faulty wiring on a brittle-brown Christmas tree, and from the top branch, I hear the pineal gland murmur: “The night is young!” as my olfactory lobes detect the smell of smoke, and hormones spray from a pituitary sprinkler filling my blood with adrenaline jet fuel, causing my diaphragms to pump like bellows, sucking a tornado of night air down my trachea, stars and all, lifting me like a helium balloon as my pulsing aorta takes all the flow the old ticker can muster, temporal arteries beating my head like twin tom-toms until I whirl in a vertigo dance, the rush of red cells flooding my cheeks, ears, and loins causing both chambers of my corpus cavernosum to engorge, and well, you know … yet I barely can hear my appendix drone endlessly on about feeling neglected, useless, because the auditory nerves are ringing church bells in my ears, as every cell lights up like the 4th of July, and combustible emotions ignite in the hippocampus and amygdala, burn across the medulla, down my spinal cord like a fuse, sodium and calcium ion channels opening as muscles contract, my lips part, and I take you in my arms for a deep kiss—so, don’t you smirk and roll your eyes and tell me I don’t know the meaning of “love,” ’cause baby, I’m up to my anus in degrees, and I wrote the damn textbook on love! |
JOHN A. VANEK, MD, is a physician and poet with works published in numerous literary journals, university press anthologies (most recently, Red, White and Blues: Poets On The Promise Of America, from the University of Iowa Press), as well as such diverse publications as the Journal of the American Medical Association (featured poem), and Biker Ally—The Motorcycle Magazine Geared For Women. He has read his poetry at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, and Eckerd College in Florida. His first full-length book of poetry, entitled Heart Murmurs: Poems, was published in 2009.
Highlighted in Frontispiece Fall 2010 – Volume 2, Issue 3
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