Synkroniciti is honored to welcome back writer and poet Daniel Gene Barlekamp of Massachusetts, who first appeared with us in Belonging and later returned for Haunting. His new poem, “In the Waiting Room at the Breast Health Center,” is a quiet, devastating meditation on medical anxiety, specifically the most dreaded of possibilities, cancer. He never mentions the word. He doesn’t need to.
Waiting for his wife to emerge from the labyrinth of the hospital, he finds himself anxious and unable to focus.
“A middle-aged couple joins me in the waiting room,/ leaving a respectful distance between us./ I thought we had years to go before we reached this place,/ but here we are. Time collapses.”
Daniel captures the surreal dislocation of helplessness, the way fear hollows out the present even as it sharpens every detail. Yet threaded through the experience is something sturdier than dread: a resilience that rises instinctively, almost involuntarily, as if the body and spirit know how to brace before the mind does.
Daniel doesn’t offer answers or platitudes. Instead, he gives us the raw textures of being human: tenderness, humor, grit, and mortal fear coexisting in the fluorescent hush of a hospital waiting room.
Read in “In the Waiting Room at the Breast Health Center” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Daniel Gene Barlekamp is the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for adults and young readers. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Eclectica, Paterson Literary Review, Seventh Quarry, and elsewhere and have been translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall. He is on the staff of Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag. Originally from New Jersey, Daniel now lives with his wife and son in Massachusetts, where he practices U.S. immigration law.