This past Halloween, I rewatched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and thought about costumes. Who here is truly in disguise? Is it Frank-N-Furter with his heavy eye makeup, corset and garter, or Janet and Brad with their buttoned-up blouses, white doll shoes and matching purse, who come alive only after they are stripped to their underclothes and made up, for the final performance, in drag? Sometimes we dress up as monsters, but perhaps more often we hide our quirky selves beneath bland cloaks of conformity, afraid of the attention an unusual performance might attract.
My poem, “Plague Doctors,” and Sean J. Mahoney’s “Dude, the Stage?” (Intima, Fall 2014 ) both address performance anxiety: In mine, a quintet is adept but outstays its welcome, and the physician narrator’s dread of the next day’s call shift is felt, I think, in the trees lashed about by wind and rain, the desire to escape to another time (old age) or place (the far north) or the land of dreams, and the effort to self-comfort with hot beverages and plans for Halloween. In “Dude, the Stage?” though, even the dream is a place of anxiety for the speaker, who feels more like a jerky puppet than a real boy with his clonus and “compromised truss rod, hollowed body.” For a person with a debilitating disease, the need to perform can feel constant: his desire is not to impress an audience (for they have grown impatient and left) but simply to go about day-to-day life looking normal enough that others aren’t compelled to offer help. His ideal self, though, a gifted artist or physician of sorts, his “finger on the pulse of this progressive dive” is his harshest, perhaps his only, critic.
So why disguise ourselves at all? Truly, I desire to deliver not just candy at Halloween dressed ironically as a plague doctor during an actual plague, but also good medical care to individuals who are suffering. Is it not better to try, even if I sometimes ramble on for too long, lose my train of thought, struggle to establish a diagnosis or an effective treatment plan, smoothly run the code, place the tube, save the life? Maybe instead of creating gaps, distancing ourselves from our obligations, as the speaker in "Plague Doctors" longs to do, we should inhabit them, come alive within them, reach across the gaps that already exist towards each other's broken bodies, wind-lashed, tired, out of time, and hold each other upright.
Carla Barkman is a family physician based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, practicing in the north. Her poetry has appeared in Vallum, Grain, NeWest Review, Contemporary Verse 2, prairie fire, Stanzas and other literary journals and was included in the anthologies apart - a year of pandemic poetry and prose (Saskatchewan Writers Guild) and Line Dance (Burton Books). She recently completed a BA (English) at the University of Regina. Her poem “Plague Doctors” appears in the Fall 2021 issue of the Intima