Phantom

    by James S. Wilk

I lost you years ago and I’m off-

kilter, asymmetrical, deformed.

I can feel people staring behind me,

wondering how it happened.

Was it the war? A mishap

on a motorcycle? Cancer?

It’s anticlimactic to think that

one day you simply detached.

But I feel your fingers,

the firm flesh of the forearm,

the taut sinews of the wrist,

the boniness of the elbow.

The burning, the gnawing

so authentic, I’d swear

you filled the entirety

of my rolled-up and safety-pinned sleeve.

© 2011  James S. Wilk

James S. Wilk is a physician in Denver specializing in medical disorders complicating pregnancy. In addition to previous issues of Touch: The Journal of Healing, his poems have appeared in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Healing Muse, Ars Medica, and others. His chapbook of medical poems, The Seven Year Night: Poems of the Medical Training Experience, is available at Big Table Press.