Word Choice features original works of fiction and poetry. Read two poems by Jaswinder Bolina, with art by Scott Hazard, selected by Daniel Moysaenko.

Caterpillar

When I’m waiting in the examination room
at the dermatology clinic for Dr. Fine to arrive
and undo the six stitches knitted into my jawline,
it’s superfluous to ruminate on beauty
and the marvelous human machine. The city
doesn’t need another treatise on healing,
another ode to pulchritude. It needs more lidocaine,
compression wraps, 0.9% bacteriostatic solution,
and more diamond-edged cutting blades
for the road workers incising Halsted Street
four stories below the window, more gauzy cirrus
bandaging the jawbreaker-blue dome
of early afternoon, more of the scaffolding
that gives the skyline the appearance of a patient
in traction so the whole of Chicago feels always
unfinished. Beauty is too easy. The serene
brown bottle and its white block font plainly
stating ALCOHOL is beautiful in its honesty,
and the glittery diode in the catastrophic red
of the fire alarm on the wall is beautiful for its pent-up
vigilance, and the cover of People magazine there
on the rack is flat-out ravishing with its vivid photographs,
its brash pronouncements. It says ELIN NORDEGREN
IS DATING AGAIN. What a relief! Elin Nordegren
is too gorgeous to go alone, and though I’m uncertain
who she is or on what reef she’s been lacerated
after what wreckage of marriage to emerge again
into romance as if a deity from the sea, I’m concerned
for her well-being same as the motorists who pull
to the curb to permit the anonymous, wailing ambulance
to pass, a gesture that serves as proof humble acts
of astonishing beauty are possible even in the rancor
of traffic. And it’s true Dr. Fine, first name Lauren,
possesses a confidence that begets elegance
which begets grace, so she’s awful beautiful too,
more so than Elin Nordegren, and more so
for the ring on her finger which makes her
utterly unavailable for dating, but I wait for her still
on the butcher paper of the exam bed with sutures
in my face that give me the appearance of being
more rugged and vulnerable than I am, more beautiful
and true, but honestly I’ve had my fill of truth and beauty.
I need to know the uncertain and the scarred also
so I don’t mistake this for a place I’m welcome
to linger in ever expecting an exquisite other to enter
and mend me. No, don’t dally a minute, doctor.
Open the door and bring me some terrible news.

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