There is nothing poetic about a waiting room.

By: Freya Cook (guest writer)

There are six of us in total.
Five of us sit in the waiting room, and I watch as
a nurse leads one of us off into the ultrasound room.
I wonder if it feels the same as Charles the First walking to execution;
Have you requested a second gown too, so you don’t get cold and shiver,
and have us mistake it for fear?
I think we could forgive a little fear;
we all know fear here, we know it intimately.

I do hope you can also forgive me for a metaphor.
It is easier for me to swallow if I speak in metaphors.
If we dress this sterile waiting room in flowery language, I can make it
pretty to look at, make it nicer to read about. Make it easier to forget.

describe the tiles on the floor as the dance mat
you learned all the steps on when you were seven,
describe the cracks in the ceiling above the examination table
with hydrangeas blooming out of them like it’s spring already,

describe the women as battle-ready warriors,
uprooting trees as we march on through,
eating hearts for breakfast, blood smeared
round our mouths like savage war paint.

Perhaps if I write a poem about us like this,
we can all forget we are not.
We are no army of soldiering women.
we barely even look each other in the eye. I am ashamed to admit this:
This is not something you’d write a poem about.

So, I sit in the waiting room. Quiet.
In my head, in my metaphor of a savage woman army,
I am unafraid. But here,
there are five women in a waiting room, each terrified beyond belief.
This is not something you’d write a poem about.

I wonder what happens to the rest of them.
I get my leaflet about my benign fibroadenoma and walk out the doors
without glancing back. But why would I?
We were not friends; we were no nature-bending army.
We were six people sitting together in the coldest room in the hospital,
each teetering on the edge between shattering and solidifying,
each breath caught in our lungs, our tomorrows not a definite thing.

And yet, I feel like I know you all intimately. I feel like we have
carried the space of liminality together. I feel like I have stood
in a minefield with you all, and danced.

I’m sorry; I keep getting swept up in the metaphors, in the poetic, the pretty.