Waiting Room Again

The lady with three kids

in the corner of the room yells:

“You want your ass warm?

I’ll beat your ass in front of anyone.

Don’t think I won’t!” She

screams as much for us

as for her doomed offspring.

This fleshy prodigy producer

should have taken a Do Not Reproduce 

pledge, but no luck. “I’ll beat your ass,”

she bawls again, and I find us another 

place to sit, far away from this 

impresario of abuse.

Judy has to get another injection

for the relentless pain in her hips and back.

Her cane keeps a mordant rhythm while 

we move to our new seats only to hear

the lady in the wheelchair by the fish tank

loudly proclaim, “What matters

is that you’re saved. The water 

doesn’t mean a thing. You’re saved

what’s important!” 

They take Judy for her injection and 

I jam plastic buds into my ear canals, 

hoping that Khachaturian will save me

from whaling fanatics and frantic

ferocious Medusas. When Judy returns

we go to lunch at the Regent Square Café.

I have bacon and eggs, she French toast.

The injection doesn’t work, her pain returns,

but the food is good, and the drive back 

made marvelous by the green/yellow gleam 

of sycamores that line our route home.

Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.