Ira Joel Haber
Penn Medicine Would like Your Feedback
We depend on our patients and their families to keep us informed. Please take a few minutes to complete the following patient satisfaction survey. Thank you, and please accept our best wishes for your good health.
Good health;
the luxury of rosy cheeks
and dormant oncogenes
and cells which divide
like normal fucking cells;
good health,
and I resent my husband’s oncologist’s e-mail signature
like I resent my own good health
when I think about widowhood.
Please rate the services you received from our facility. Select the response that best describes your experience.
I mean,
can you find his fucking veins
once in a while
while you’re pumping poison
into his circulatory system?
Main source of payment for services (fill in one circle only)
The GoFundMe
to buy the medicine
to keep my husband alive
was not even enough;
and never have I so craved
#medicareforall
than when dealing with the travesty
of private American insurance.
Please rate from 1 (Very Poor) to 5 (Very Good): Ease of reaching the office staff on the telephone
I mean,
does anyone even work at the Receptionist’s desk?
Nurses as gatekeepers,
as the Orcs outside Mount Doom,
as Cerebrus and Saint Peter and the burly bouncer at the bar,
and it must be
that physicians turn to stone
when asked to talk on the phone.
How well were you kept informed about delays?
Hours
in an infusion chair,
intravenous lines like meandering vines
snaking deep into the very fallible
and very mortal
core of my soulmate;
antihistamines the only defense
against the anaphylaxis
into which my husband’s allergic body
insists on descending;
so…what’s a few hours more?
Degree to which the staff addressed your emotional needs
I mean,
we’re talking about
mortal fucking terror
every fucking day
as the pandemic rages
and the world melts
and capitalism crushes us all,
as cells divide and time passes and our children grow;
and while I know the granola bars
and the free sodas
are supposed to help…
my husband’s emotional needs
are not being met.
And I can’t do anything to help.
Please rate your level of satisfaction with the care you have received at Penn Medicine.
…ask that when you’ve cured his cancer.
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is the author of These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (Poetry, Really Serious Literature, 2022), Correspondence to Nowhere(Nonfiction, Bone & Ink Press, 2022), and An Oral History of One Day in Guyana (Fiction, Sledgehammer Lit,2022.) Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 250 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.