Abby Wheeler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a 2022 Pushcart nominee and has work published or forthcoming in The Cimarron Review; Grist; the anthology, I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig) and elsewhere. Her chapbook, In the Roots, is available from Finishing Line Press.
I recognized right away a kinship with Bessie Liu’s “Variations on the Negative Space Before Healing” (Fall 2023) and its use of subtraction to create new meaning; The poem by Liu, a third-year medical student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. very much feels like a sister to my poem, At the Doctor’s Office, I Check, Yes, I Have Experienced the Following: Sudden Weight Loss (Fall 2023).
Liu’s poem, created from a series of erasures in a surgical pathology report, visually explores the act of removal, or a dwindling down, and in doing so mirrors the narrative of loss—physical, bodily, or otherwise. This erasure (one of a series, she notes) transforms an “extensive degree” of loss into a work of striking survival; it gives a new shape to what remains. Put another way: what was there doesn’t disappear, but becomes counterpart to the remainder. Liu writes, “I met my counterpart, I came to erase it.” Medically speaking, treatment may eradicate disease, but poetically, erasure signals metamorphosis.
So often, the business of medicine and the body is one of subtraction. We kill an infection, we resect a tumor. We vomit, we evacuate. We bleed. Sometimes until the body has nothing left. My poem came at a time when death was heavy on my mind, along with the recurrence of personal illness. It seeks to blur the lines between binaries like life and death, here and not here, and imagine the places in between. Are we more here if we have more body? Does here = alive? My poem’s title names unintended weight loss as a subject of interrogation: When one suddenly (or slowly) has less body, where has it gone? And what does that say about our existence? In the poem’s imagining, there is a sliding scale on which we transition from being fully in a body to fully out of one.
As it turns out, lost weight is shed via carbon dioxide in exhalation and H20 in sweat and urine; we become air and water. I write: “There is only home.” Liu writes: “I am still here.”
Abby Wheeler lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a 2022 Pushcart nominee and has work published or forthcoming in The Cimarron Review; Grist; the anthology, I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig) and elsewhere. Her chapbook, In the Roots, is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poem “At the Doctor’s Office, I Check, Yes, I have Experienced the Following: Sudden Weight Loss” appears in the Fall 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.