John 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 Poem
Christmas 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 Love
When 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 Volume 2, Issue 3 – Fall 2010
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