Gorgeous Mickey Menzel the surgeon calls me “gorgeous” as he gleefully beams admiring his recent handiwork that was meant to refurbish, fix the outside of my body, my home. but he wasn’t there at 3 a.m. in the hospital hallway when I was screaming, trying to swallow the pain and my father begged the nurses who walked by with their eyes averted and their ears turned off while I was on the stretcher in the hall, neglected for hours and hours. months later my haunted house body is tied up with a bow; these scars are only visible to a trained or spying eye inside a relentless fire whips around there are no hinges, bolts, screws and the grisly howling picks up especially at night. I am full of ghastly ghosts and trembling bones which have been ripped off and thrust around the remnants of tissue that once were body parts are strewn on the floor, singed at the edges black and sooty big holes of missing pieces chewed away by myself or silently stolen at the hand of a medical professional; I did not consent for them to take my flesh. the cold cold rain drips from the ceiling of my bones I quake and think of that fire inside me it is merely ebbing, not extinguished and the surgeon says Gorgeous -Mickey Menzel is a graduate student from Ann Arbor, MI, pursuing a master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Pepperdine University.-
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