The Radiologist

I still remember the day I sat
on a padded bench among other women,
waiting to be zapped with invisible rays,
aimed at an invisible place inside my breast,
reduced by surgery to pulp and scoured
by chemicals, hoping to burn away
the remnants of those reticent cells
that grew with abandon just months ago.

You were the fourth in a line of doctors
to step up and take a turn at curing me.
It was faith alone that brought me here.
A nurse came up to me and said,
right on cue,that I looked depressed
in my disposable gown, as you said I
would be, for one does not go unscathed
when zapped on a regular basis.

You assured me that only a small
percentage of your patients became
clinically depressed and had to be committed.
I laughed.
You had lifted the anvil of depression
with a single joke. And that’s why
they pay you the big bucks.
Twenty years out, I am still laughing.

Susan Love Brown is a professor of anthropology and an aspiring poet. Although she has been writing poetry since childhood, her only published poem, “Autumn Jazz,” a villanelle, won the Writer’s Digest 87th Annual Writing Competition for rhyming poetry in 2018. She hopes to inspire further publications in the future.