Headwaters

And a question of where poetry belongs

I have written poems for decades, published a few, and self-published many. However, I have never considered submitting a poem to a peer-reviewed medical journal.

A brave they/them has done just that and had a poem titled "They was Patient" recently published in Health Promotion Practice and shared by Colin Wright on X.

This poem is said to promote public health by promoting "the irreverence of gender euphoria."

In response, I submit one of my poems to the public health discourse. Perhaps it too deserves a place in a medical peer reviewed journal. I will let you all be the judge.

Fall on the Mississippi River

Headwaters 

 

Nietzche I have never read 

your intellect can lap my mile splits

best times

but  

 

In this time 

a barge on the Mississippi 

is constant 

or is it incessantly churning 

 

Northern bound 

to the headwaters 

to the beginning, which is the end 

 

Can we make the trip with 

stamina enough to reconstruct these bodies sacred 

or at least to stop the churning out of more damage 

 

When does a person 

become the person ready 

how can we stroke though to the bottom of that

murky mighty water 

 

Can we bring the reckoning? 

 

Modernism to postmodernism happened at 

3:32pm on July 15, 1972

when Pruitt Igoe was torn down 

 

Postmodernism swallowed me whole

the first time I plunged a 14 gauge needle

filled with viscous testosterone cypionate 

into a woman in my bed 

 

Regardless of when 

a person becomes ready to be put back to the body sacred 

 

Let us travel to the beginning 

which is the end