After Another School Shooting, I Get My Radiation Treatment

And other poems by James Dickson

The poems below are part of a collection of cancer-related works that poet and teacher Jamie Dickson is developing in a “new, still-seeking-a-publisher” manuscript. Jamie writes: “I’m currently not in treatment and, pending a few more years of clear screenings, will be declared ‘cured,’ which will be another similarity bacon and I share. I’d also like to use this space to encourage reluctant readers to get a colonoscopy. I was completely asymptomatic, no family history, and discovered the tumor during my first (what I thought would be) routine screening. The scope literally saved my life.”

Photo by David Becker on Unsplash

After Being Diagnosed with a Stage 3 Tumor,

we hit that new burger place on Highland, 
and it was amazing. The patties smashed
thin and crisped at the edges. Stupid 
amounts of soft cheddar and provolone.
Brioche, because we’re fancy, and pickled
red onions.  The young server kept our 
iced teas topped off, which helped the soft
March breeze keep us cool.  And the birds
that had nested under the awning, swooping
and sweeping the patio for crumbs, they sang.  
My God, how they sang.  




Grading Quizzes in the Waiting Room

I’m marking wrong answers—
bold red X’s on the errors. 

Called back, pants dropped, 
tabled beneath the linear accelerator

that jabs photons into my abdomen, 
my skin adorned with aiming points:

marker-drawn X’s over what’s not right.




After Another School Shooting, I Get My Radiation Treatment

The nurses evacuate 
before firing 
up the machine that will shoot
a beam into the soft
envelope of my body.  

The door slides, sealing 
the lead-lined tomb, 
and I relax in safety.  

---

James Dickson teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, MS. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is the recipient of Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, was named High School Literary Magazine Advisor of the Year by the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association, and was invited to speak at the National Educators Association 50th anniversary celebration “The Promise of Public Education.” His poems, book reviews, and essays appear in The Common, Ruminate, Hospital Drive, The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Slant, Poetry Quarterly, McSweeney’s, Sylvia, and his first collection, Some Sweet Vandal, was published by Kelsay Books. He lives in Jackson with his wife, their son, and a small menagerie of animals.

Read more by Jamie Dickson: