An Emergency Room We Call a Nation
A Poem by Michael Roque
A year of in-betweens in a vibrant life now resembling an ER waiting room— people-packed in varying states of anguish. Those wheelchair-bound, abandoned in halls, those bedridden, speaking in groans and the many— sitting, standing seemingly unfazed, but to an extent all commonly feeling pain, a need for a doctor we don’t see, a need for the aches to be eased, but malnourished on stretchers— Our only medics. Beeps, screams. Whines, cries. Rushing feet, panicked eyes and another flatline to collectively ring in every ear. Heave— heave— heave— Wait— and breathe, wait— and breathe. I squeeze the sweat-soaked sheets, as my soul strains through me by the second, deflating my being like a liferaft with a leak, leaving me stagnant in a drowning situation calling for patience. Patience, while feeling a cast iron rod pierce through my heart, clog my throat, prod my brain. Patience, while plowing through another day by the grace of a caffeine-powered body. By the mercy of a mind hoping tomorrow might rebirth a fallen yesteryear to remind me— I’m of worth. At last, doctor calls my name, fires questions out the mouth like a Mossberg 500 and rushes away for another four months, leaving more holes in a leaking plot needing to be filled. No surgery nor novocaine just more stagnance in a room where spinning ceiling fans are the only movement seen— the sole motion spreading around everyone’s disease. Am I far off somewhere? Daydreaming in a car stuck in a roundabout, having a bad trip in a brighter year, or am I really trapped in an unending day? An ER kept alive by insomnia and a newly discovered inability to walk through chaotic hallways— ’cause never failing to freeze are two legs locking me between entrance and exit— stranding me in a smothering embrace.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque (they/them) discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like North Dakota Quarterly, Cholla Needles, The Literary Hatchet and others.
