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Dr. Gannon must have made the rounds
a thousand times without once losing
patients in his prime-time world,
its symptoms all emergency.
Back then, my favored bedtime story featured
bodies crushed and built again by just one visit
to the TV cure, a treatment expertly performed.
How romantic to be saved by drama!
Then one segment cast a bleak disease,
its only foe a facial peel-back, gruesome
slit from chin to ear; in black and white,
misfortune’s mother prepped her stage-child.
In sixty minutes minus the commercials,
Gannon played his role, pulled off
the ugly death mask and restored
to model trim the tragic broken doll.
Closely examining the made-up scars,
my faith in surgery began to waver.
The time had come to entertain the need
for research: somewhere, a perfect healing.
Leslie Goerner is the author of two poetry collections, The Life of Light (1994) and Saying Grace (1999), from Bellowing Ark Press in Seattle. More than seventy poems have appeared nationwide in magazines such as America, Black Bear Review, Christian Century, Concourse, Excursus, First Things, Lake Effect, New Song, North Stone Review, and The Other Side. An essay appeared in Commonweal, and a short story was accepted by Treasure House. She was the recipient of the Newhouse Award in Poetry from Binghamton University and was nominated by Bellowing Ark Press for the 2000 Pushcart Prize. In May 2003, her poetry won the Creative Arts Contest sponsored by the Reformed Presbyterian Witness and placed in the Perelandra Writing Contest.
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