At the Women's Health Center

I wear socks in my mom’s favorite color, pray to her 
a little as I’m led to the vestibule by a woman  
who explains how the gown ties in front,  
which I already know. But I don’t interrupt.  
It’s bad luck to keep a woman from doing her job.  
And maybe her words are a ritual blessing.  
I thank her and enter the changing room,  
trade everything I have for a thin cotton gown,  
emerge with my clothes balled up under my arm. 
I search the bank of lockers for a lucky number,  
but all my usuals are taken. Then I see it: 22.  
The year and the day I’m standing in, the minute  
the clock-hand just landed on. The lanyard  
dangling from locker 22 is purple, the exact purple  
of the winter coat my mom always wore 
before she began to disappear. I stuff everything  
inside, close and lock the skinny door, slip  
the purple coil around my wrist. Luck turns the key  
into a protection charm, the interior waiting room  
into a temple of filtered light. We enter, one at a time,  
to sit together in silence. In our identical habits,  
we look more like our mothers than on most days.  
We leaf through magazines or pretend to watch  
the news, which someone, probably a nurse,  
has muted.

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Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.