Ode to the Phlebotomist at 2135 Holbrook Road  

praise that when I rise by myself
in an empty elevator in secret
I always turn my back to the doors
praise a tiny defiance that can be as silly and stupid
as this empty waiting room
waking itself up at 7:45AM
and wiping the dust out of its eyes
as I float out onto its tiled floor like some groggy druid in a dark hoodie
as I introduce myself more deeply to the silent vow of its temple walls
as I shiver the winter cringe away
from my squared shoulders
and praise this clipboard empty
but for only my name written on the top
praise the big white button marked BELL
and PLEASE PRESS ONLY ONCE!
in nine hot red Post-it-Notes of overkill
praise this woman in rosy scrubs
who arrives like the memory of strawberries from behind door number 225
who is having some kind of morning
and who has forgotten her damn badge to get us back into the lab
and who must bang flat-handed and grunt against the door to be let back in
and praise her coworker with her can of Diet Coke for saving us out here
and shipping us like ragged packages across the next tiled threshold
praise the way I don’t think
before I say I feel that
praise commiseration before introduction
before I say I know that kind of morning
and praise her for saying I know you know more than anyone honey
and praise the way she is escorting me back to her lab by letting me lead
praise all her souvenirs of modern science
praise the jab under her breath at some bad manager named Jason
praise the squeak of her silver Jordans
praise her cherry-rimmed eyeglasses
praise that six months ago what I thought was unbearable
(like feeding a needle into my side for the rest of my life)
could become a Tuesday routine as a glass of water by the bed
and who am I that I have come to gratitude for every needle even
so of course I say praise these holy needles of course
praise it all this day I say
praise I say that I feel so cozy
with giving my own veins away to someone I’ve just met
praise I trust her with that much this early
praise this human woman who has just dropped my paperwork
and then a few empty vials and then a box of gloves onto the floor
praise being the first customer at this health bank to help with the spill
praise my fingers pressed lightly against her stomach now
praise her blue hands locating the good vein it seems without even looking
while she says I can still do that       I am still good at that
praise this consideration given between two strangers
while my blood beats into the tiny vials
praise my mouth saying we’re going to get through it     aren’t we
praise that while a sample of me is leaving my body
so am I somehow filling with thankfulness
praise the photo blown up on the wall behind me
of this woman beside a greying man in a hospital bed
praise her saying I know      I know       we just need a little coffee
that’s it     friends      that’s all
praise each day we are reminded
despite our badges and charts
we are
(every one of us)
(it is this simple)
just patients in need of relief
praise what cells I’ve given here
praise whoever will test them I’ll never have wine with (I love them too)
praise the results might be closer this time to what we want
praise this cotton gauze
and tape this woman is wrapping warmly around the vein and the arm of the whole world
her wrapping as gentle as the words in a handwritten letter from our own mother
who is still alive (I love you too mom)
praise any appointment for being over this early
praise all of us walking back into our uniforms
and facing the elevator doors
which are just now opening
into a new life where we ask for nothing
our bodies just keep making more kindness
we just keep giving it away

Ode to All the Old Diabetic Heads, Most Especially to Miss June in the Waiting Room at the Center of The Modern World

Through the tiny circle
in the bulletproof Plexiglas,
the receptionist says,
“We don’t have you scheduled for an appointment today, Miss June”
to the woman
in the dope white sunshades and the cute pink purse,
and the woman, Miss June,
(who will tell me later she’s in her mid-seventies)
simply says back, “Whatever,
y’all just fucking figure it out and get me in,”
and then says nothing,
and then turns and finds a seat beside me,
and I remain for more than a few moments in awe
while, like some southern
and finely aged vintage
of Lady Gaga or Zsa Zsa Gabor, Miss June removes her shades to use as a mirror
while she touches up her lipstick,
a few deep red dabs on a black silk handkerchief.
I don’t know what the rest of these veteran diabetics are thinking. Maybe they’ve been diabetic
long enough not to be thinking,
“I wish I wasn’t a diabetic anymore,” like I am,
but, stubborn and duct-taped together and needle-worn and tattooed,
and each of us distinctly unlike
the patient or UFC fighter
in the octagon or waiting room seat beside us,
we should all,
all of us, stand up
right now, I think, and applaud
Miss June, but we don’t, which is also understandable,
each of us engulfed
in our own daily version of a similar fist-to-elbow combat
with our own bodies and clipboards
and phone calls and calculators
and copays and receipts
and all of that,
which one might imagine weighs nothing,
is dropped on the roof of our already complex lives outside of this building,
like more and more refrigerators
falling out of the heavens
and through your roof
and into your living room
until your whole house
is no longer your house,
until every space you’re inside
is just another place called Diabetes…
I’m sorry for wandering so far away from the scene
so often. Let me get back to Miss June
in this room, and to how I was
saying we are deep
in South Carolina
and so, deep in the armpit
of August, and some days, some misplaced
paperwork means
the two-hour drive your “young” (her word) husband had to take off work
at the post office
to get you to
has somehow simply vanished,
and the day you’ve rebuilt your life around for the last six months
suddenly must be
remodeled again
and waited for,
for another six months,
and wouldn’t that make anyone angry?
But this Miss June next to me, my new pop star
in plum flats, who goes on talking
and fanning herself with the pamphlet on kidney disease in her right hand,
isn’t angry at all,
and seems, instead, to own
some kind of curious indifference,
like some veteran basketballer, some Zen master
with a black handkerchief, holding court
on the end of the bench,
feeding the new kid (the new diabetic me) beside her
all the intricacies
of the game I didn’t even know were also going on
before us, behind that window
with the O in it. Miss June says some (not all) of the people
you pay to take care of you
will do so only after you push them around (verbally),
some you have to curse at,
some you have to murder with a kinder word, and it’s here I start
thinking about what Lorca said,
how the threat of death
must be in every poem
or maybe in every appointment, and how now my life has the threat of death
in every day by insulin overdose,
and is it really as simple as Miss June
tells me when she tells me
you can either be the loud-mouthed asshole
in every office you’ll ever enter in the name of your health
or you can die here, today,
in this waiting room, now,
and if it’s the dying you choose, honey,
she says, please remember to do so
silently, remember to do so
politely even, as if you never mattered
to anyone,
as if you were never here at all.

Ode to All The Pillaging We Have Withstood 

I was trying to sandbag
against the flood of high blood sugar
on the living room treadmill
until 2:45AM last night
so I must acknowledge flat out
that my morning mug is a little too full
of bitchiness and self-obsession
but this little neighborhood rock band
of orange-bellied robins
is skipping around in the grass
cracking dirty jokes
and playing hacky sack
and chasing seed aimlessly and spitting
as if behind some Charlotte bar
in a brick alley between sets
on a smoke break        in my backyard
and now I’m already laughing again
until of course
the engine of advancement fires back up
and the birds fly off to paint their daily music
across someone else’s patch of green
this is an unusual morning
made of unusual explosions
the city hard hats stuffing
their sacks of dynamite
into the old underground sewer pipes
in the tall pine forest behind our house
as when the sentimental squirrels
bury their dead acorns
in the earthy underbrush
beside our tool shed
and the spring memory of gone trees suddenly bursts open
and for hours today all we’ve been hearing are these beep-beep-beeps
of dirty yellow giants backing up
for hours and then these detonations
boom after boom of a stadium sized bass drum
these upheavals from under the house
like a seizure of the hip joints
which have been holding our home together
for these long two years
for as long as we’ve been here
through mold and snow and tornadoes
and softball-sized hail and ceiling leaks
and gutters ripped down by suicide branches
through both of our fathers on oxygen in far-away hospitals
through that three-month winter of three busted water heaters
through patio raccoons and attic mice
and screen-door snakes and shower frogs
and through that one infamous palmetto bug divebombing out
of the overhead fan and onto our sleeping faces at 2 a.m.
through seasons of Covid and swine flu and Diabetes and depression
and OCPD and anxiety and one car totaled and many friendships
and jobs lost and one electrical fire behind the hallway mirror
that almost ended it all
and in every boom is this reminder
in every room
these bricks this subfloor
this superstructure
these beams this clay
this foundation whole armies of sky and country and blood and DNA and nature
and science and God and technology have thrown their finest mountains of dynamite against
this house this marriage
built on the memory of every boom it has withstood
is somehow
still standing unannihilated
like a rock island rising silent out of the fog
and a warning written on the cliffs
with the entrails of our pirate enemies
turn back now motherfuckers
all who try to conquer this land will be lost

Ephraim Scott Sommers is a Type-1 Diabetic and the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). Currently, he lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina and is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is also an actively touring singer-songwriter. For music and poems, please visit: www.ephraimscottsommers.com.