my hand is burning but I don’t feel it.
Needle bent, nurse inattentive or attentive
to the wrong things, no one paid to notice
notices the Taxol escaping my IV and moving
into my arm until it has made it almost to my elbow. 

The Ativan meant to calm me, make me
a good little cancer girl quiet for her chemo
only unearths some teenage version of me
usually hidden under too many years of get this done
and here’s how people do we call adulthood. 

Instead of sleeping like everyone else in the infusion lab,
I flirt with the dietician even after she’s
made fun of my flip phone and looked at
my coconut water judgmentally.

I lead us in a sing-along of cartoon songs:
DuckTales, Duckula, Duckman. All the ducks in a row,
even if some we can only hum.
I prayersplain to the nurse that if only she hadn’t
asked that this vein take an IV, but instead
that she’d find the right vein, then none of this
would have happened. I’m a kid again,
what do I know, but everything?

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Columbus, Ohio, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she edits confidential government documents, which is not nearly so spy-like as it sounds. Her work has appeared previously in Drunk Monkeys, as well as in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and Sou'wester. She serves as a reader for Emrys.