MIRISSA D. PRICE - POEMS

​The doctor said she would live in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair, crippled by pain. That was thirteen years ago. Instead, Mirissa D. Price is a 2019 DMD candidate at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, spreading pain-free smiles, writing through her nights, and, once again, walking through her days.  As a Huffington Post blogger and emerging writer, Mirissa has publications in Yellow Chair Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Tuck Magazine, and more. Follow Mirissa’s writing at https://mirissaprice.wordpress.com/.

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​                       The Differential Diagnosis of Terror
 
I can tell you
why your heart scribbles
in irregularly irregular markings
on the printout
of an ECG, and I can
 
tell you why you’re living
on the edge
of cardiac dysfunction when
your chest starts
 
to burn.  I was trained
to understand senility in your
drawing of a clock
at half past
 
ten, and I understand
your dyspnea when you start to pant
after two steps of
work.  I can
 
explain to you the
difference in your blood pressure
from when you rest
to the moment
 
when you rise, and I can
deduce why your bones
ache now that
you have aged.  I was
 
taught to hear
your triumph through your words,
and to use caution
when calling your pain
 
a chief complaint.  But I never
took a class
in how to comfort a refugee
of terrorism,
 
and I never
felt the pulse of a man
taking cover
from a bomb.  I only
 
can imagine
the smell of flesh
turning grey under scalding
flames, and can’t even
 
picture the arrhythmia
of thoughts
that must traverse
your mind when trapped
 
in the hatred of
an extremist plot. Because
that’s what it was –
 
Hatred
that turned you from
a Turkish brother
to a patient,
 
victim of a blast
at 18:40, a time I wouldn’t even
recognize on a clock.  And
that’s what it was –
 
Extreme
violence that impeded
the sinus tachycardia
of your heart
 
in a moment
I couldn’t even begin
to diagnose
 
the condition of a terrorist
who saw no other meaning
in an irregularly irregular rhythm
than as that –
 
a target.  And I wish
I could interpret this violence, too,
as a mere fibrillation
without consequence, an electrical
 
anomaly in LED lines, because
then I wouldn’t
see your bloodied body as
familiar, your tears
 
as misdiagnosed pain; when
I was trained
as a doctor to look
for solutions buried
in the physiology of a fracture,
 
and after
Paris, Beirut, New
York and Ankara, I still have
no scientific rationale for
what the news tries to explain.   

​                            The Color of an Oscar
 
‘Needle lace’ - that's what the store clerk told me.  Only the best attire for the Oscars.  And the winner is.  Never the blacks, to be politically correct.  But it comes in red, mauve, and skin tone.  She said, in a store five blocks from the QuikTrip.  Where an unarmed man was shot.  He was brown, though.  I noticed, in the microfiber rubbings of my sofa.  But at 4:37 p.m., the death certificate only had four boxes: White. Hispanic. Asian. African.  American, they called this spectacle of stars on commercial break.  I pick mauve.  The color of my flesh. 
 
 
 
 

​                                    One Click Away
 
I feel dirty sometimes
when I turn the lipstick out of the tube,
I think it’s the shape;
and the color,
so ripe,
like a pop-up notification on my msn homepage. 
And that’s how I get
my news – in dirty little pop-ups
of what google says I should read
like the breaking story that Cesar Millan’s whispers
are damning
to my golden retriever’s carefree clicks
 
of his salivating tongue.  And though my dog is
two-thousand miles away,
I can hear those carefree clicks
each time I follow the internet’s lure
to the next trending topic – because trends define
our nation’s focus: on a woman with bi-
paternal twins, a medical anomaly, a
personal curiosity.  I turn to the comments
often, before finishing
the content, wondering what hypotheses are stirring
to explain the miracle of two men
fertilizing
 
one woman
within the same ovulatory cycle.  I’m sure
the reporters asked
that question, the same way I’m sure they asked
‘how’
could a baby die unvaccinated, but that’s
not their job, or is it - stirring the pot
of Facebook uproar,
 
and ‘uproar’ happened to be highlighted
in the article, linking me
to news of middle school graffiti –
art and swastikas
burning the minds of children.  They really are just children
when they first log into Facebook, onto e-mail,
when they first
browse across the tale of lawmakers
proposing a break
 
from Eastern Time. And
if not for hashtags, those kids
wouldn’t know it’s a story, replayed
the same each year, planting seeds of progress
in the hidden truth of complacency.  I would call it that – complacency, our acceptance of
dual core processing speed of ideas
in a society still running on dial-up. 
 
But I control-plus’ed
on the jpeg clock on the http page
on the digital tablet of the news,
and I found that crack
in the space between two and three,
the twenty-fifth hour.  They never
taught us to read like that
in school, when we still read news
on the ink-stained pages of
rolled-up paper, in the days when
I didn’t know about 9/11
because I didn’t know how to read, because
I wasn’t yet tall enough
to reach the remote,
 
control is what I’d call
the dirty little secret
that news is happening faster than
I can click, and creativity is how I’d paint
the pop-up reality
that msn tells me what to know,
as I choose the screen magnification
suitable
for opioid overdose.
 
And I wonder
how I’ll explain to my kids
that I feel dirty sometimes, to read that
Trump is done debating and to know
that their seventeen-year-old babysitters
have a voice in our future
without their hands ever touching
the grease
of printer-pressed reports, without my hands
absorbing the sweat-
smeared tone of importance
that ink once gave
to news that Times have changed.
 
 

​                          Wait for the Second Ring

I wonder if Obama used a landline
to call Putin - for the
prestige in tangled
cords, after all
 
after all the children were
bludgeoned
by terrorism for over five
years, just remember,
 
and this weekend when one-hundred
thirty died near Damascus,
for our leaders to pick up the phone – I wonder
 
if the Syrian residents
listened at the door once
that last thirty-one mattered.
 
To the news - it sounded majestic
declaring peace in hushed whispers,
all the men sent to war
with their wives, all the leaders
setting deadlines they’ll change;
 
but I wonder
if Lavrov and Kerry wore white
while talking - about what color they’d choose
to sign their names
in history,
 
though in retrospect,
a history book only buries
white words
scratched in principle, under ink
 
of real change, and I have to wonder
if the Oval Office plans to use a fax machine
in The Event: when they actually sign
 
a cease-fire diplomacy – it’s tradition
in the digital age
to return to basics of humanity:
 
We will not kill
We will not fire
We will not devastate
with words no one entrusts
 
to hold power; and I have to wonder
if Obama put Putin on hold
when his secretary called, “Come and answer.”