Baptism at Forty: Magnetic Resonance Imaging

by Laura Donnelly

I slid on electric belts into the cool, expensive tube,
my gown simple as a novitiate’s, soft from hundreds
of washings, its service to other bodies. A friend warned 
of clanking like a hammer’s Morse code, but around me 
the machine was a single metal shriek, ringing 
through the body and the body rung back, fissure 
and impingement found in my folds. But the hip wasn’t
giving all its secrets. And I wasn’t scared but 
in awe. Of the body. The sound. I remember bright lights
inside the machine, but that can’t be right. I closed my eyes
tight, held my breath like a diver for minutes at a time.
Outside the machine, they’d painted a cloud-puffed sky.
Everything they could do to make the room not say coffin.
I thank them for that, and the technicians that stood
behind protective glass, asking through the intercom,
are you doing alright? Then, half done! Then, just
one more before sliding me back to that sky-painted room. 
I drove the hour home alone, dusk to dark, thrumming 
with what the body had yet to know before we were done. 

::

Laura Donnelly is the author of two collections of poetry, Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press 2020) and Watershed (Cider Press Review 2014), and her recent poems appear in Iron Horse Literary Review, Colorado Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York where she teaches and serves as Chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at SUNY Oswego. Further info at www.laurakdonnelly.com.

Image: Oleg Moroz

ID: fluffy clouds and a blue sky.