Poetry by Peter Pereira, M.D.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

When she came across the border
she had no shoes — only one black
Cambodian skirt, a thin blouse, the long
scarf they use for everything: sleeping,
bathing, carrying food, wrapping
the bodies of the dead.

She no longer wants to say
what happened to her husband and brothers,
afraid if words bring them back,
along will come the soldiers.

What do I have, she asks,
to keep the nightmares away?

Next to her guttural vowels
and clipped consonants, my English
strikes a tin note. The interpreter
translates my advice, and I wonder
which sound was nerve, which
was heart, which grief.

I give her another pill to try.
Perhaps with this one
she will sleep well
tonight. A sleep untroubled
by dreams, by memory.

She listens politely, smiles
a thank-you: her only English.

Yet as I watch her leave
I know her cure comes Tuesday afternoons —
when she joins the circle of other Khmer women to sew.
Punctuating the fabric
with yellow thread, binding her remnants
Into a piece that will hold.

Nosophilia
— love of affliction

For one it's insomnia, tremor, migraine.
Another has hangnails, hives, boils.
Airsick. Seasick. Incontinent. Fat.
Such misery loves company: a listening ear.

How else count, recount what woes?
Pimples that burn. Fevers that shiver.
Shinsplint. Bowleg. Backache. Rupture.
What pains us makes us us.

Flatus. Halitosis. Heartburn. Hiccup.
Color-blind. Cross-eyes. Piles. Palsy.
What makes us absolutely.
Bunion. Harelip. Warts and all.

— Peter Pereira