Seattle Medical is Not Responsible for Lost or Damaged Souls

by Aiden Schmitt

Your mother made you this body but they’re taking it away to study
Please step out
The soul blocks
The scan of the ribs
They pour you out of your body
Intimately exposed to the impersonal fluorescents
The soft skin of your soul catches on the jagged part of your spine
And bleeds out onto on the white tile
Filthy and sterile
Some part of you will never leave this place
Gathering dust under cabinets
Not quite dead and not quite you anymore

They’ve made your body a ship of Theseus
What they took was organic
And faultless
And trusting you relinquished it
What they’ve brought back is a failed paper mache project
Questionnaires and diagnostic criteria soaked in glue
Each anomaly carefully labeled
Each identifier pathologized
What is a body
If not a list of symptoms

​

They’ve brought your body back wrong but there are people in the waiting room
Unceremoniously your anemic form gets shoved
Back into the chest cavity
Trapped and
Suffocating
Leaking into empty space
Water-damaged puzzled forced back together
A Frankenstein’s monster
of you and
yourself