When The Patient Asked For A
White Doctor
Seema Yasmin
Her temple smeared across my walls,
I bowed beneath her stream.
Two arcs of piss & bloody vomit
shot inside the MRI machine.
The half-moon rolled back and she
emerged beneath me. My: too much
brown, too much blush, too many
lashes to heal, rattled loose in a split
mouth like crack rocks. She spewed
a bloody history: my people, her father,
some agony at the West Midlands Area
Conservative Society. When she groaned
Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack,
I tempered the pain—oxycodone
for one, high grade the other, ditched
my beeper in her cradle. Switched scrubs
for straps & animal skins in the back seat
of an Audi TT. I saged my hair with a blunt.
Danced away her ruin beneath a black
girl’s melody.
Seema Yasmin is a poet, doctor and journalist from London and is currently a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University. She trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, Shallow Ends, Coal Hill Review, Glass, Breakwater Review and others. Her chapbook, For Filthy Women Who Worry About Disappointing God, won the Diode Editions chapbook contest and was published in 2017.