In America, I Can’t Talk to a Real Human at My Health Insurance Company But I am Eligible to Win a Free Medical Alert Device
Pleading to a machine is the new way to save a life. What is living if not failing to connect, healing a hope hurtled across the line like a fishing lure? I am an open mouth waiting for someone to surface, snatch me heaving and heavy with hurt from these depths. I taste the metal of blood and a rusted hook, hear, too, the tin sound of what is lifeless offering me a chance to win. I imagine warming a pearl at my throat, pain transformed like a polished stone, dangling where the silence is, pulling me back from death.
In America, I’m Denied Medical Care Because My Insurance Company Will Only Treat One Part of the Body at a Time
Dissected, I am the heaving carcass hoisted silver from the sea, salted on the fisherman’s hook. I know what it means to hang from instruments curved as a question, to glimpse relief from the holes of a net. Sever me to make an easy sell. This flesh never needed the surety of a spine. This mouth was always falling for the lure. Bloodied, I watch as parts of myself harden with time. I remember how the butcher cradled my body before tossing it gently to rest.
In America, I Can’t Access My Medical Records Because My Insurance Company Declares Bankruptcy
What is pain but the game where the more you have the more you get? I have been playing my whole life, comorbid the body’s way of saying, well fuck it. And how I wish I could—just cut my losses, write off each failed experiment, another pain, another pill, like stocks in the freefalling market. I deduct each hurt from my life, tally the sum of my parts. I wait for an algorithm to deny me access to care, talk slowly to a robot on the phone who hangs up if I shout. I report dutifully on time to doctors running late, take tests whose results go missing. I pay so many fees to be a body broken, like the line, one day, dead as the company overnight, as the years of records they have about all the ways I tried to save this silly little life.
In America, I Pay as Much to be Disabled Each Year as the Down Payment for a House
Realtors insist every house has good bones. Walls that don’t need to be broken and rebuilt, windows capturing the sun’s best light. Nothing could ever go wrong if you make this place your home, they promise. I wear surgical booties over my shoes—the kind I wear along with thin paper shrouds whenever I am inspected in hospitals for my faulty spine and the kind of disability that is visible. Both doctors and realtors try to keep things safe and gleaming. When I leave, I place the thin paper, marked with the force of my body, in the trash can so no one will ever know I was there.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. Nerve, a craft book on developing a disabled writing practice, is forthcoming with Sundress Publications, and Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University
Read two poems by Sarah Fawn Montgomery previously appearing in Terrain.org.
Header image by April stock, courtesy Shutterstock.
