General Practice

Forty-five minutes is enough time

to memorize the geography of the overheads.

There are two thousand tiny punctures

in the square directly above chair four.

In the corner, a water stain has bloomed,

a brownish continent with jagged shores.

It looks like a map of a place where nobody

has to wait for a lab tech to say

the word 'benign' or 'malignant'

or 'we’ll need to run it again.'