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Column 494

MRI

Intro by Ted Kooser
09.07.2014

I’d guess that a num­ber of our read­ers have had MRIs. One of my neigh­bors, a grav­el hauler in rur­al Nebras­ka, told me that his test sound­ed as if he were on the inside of a corn sheller. Jack­ie Fox, also a Nebraskan, has a dif­fer­ent take on the expe­ri­ence. Would you rather find your­self con­fined in a corn sheller or a dry­er? It’s no won­der we call our­selves patients.

MRI

It thuds and clanks
like tennis shoes
in a dryer, only
I am the shoe,
sour, damp and
wedged into
the narrow
metal tube,
heart clanging.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Jackie Fox. Poem reprinted from Bellevue Literary Review, Volume 13, no. 2, Fall 2013, by permission of Jackie Fox and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.