He says my whole name,

Ari … Samuel … Rosensweig,

asks me if I like my name.

I don’t know? Yes?

At first I don’t like

his one-sided voice,

the words coming

out of just the left side.

He talks to me about school,

asks me questions about girls.

I don’t really know what to say.

He expects something from me.

He asks me directly about what happened,

and I feel my side ache.

You know, Ari, sometimes

we harm ourselves

because we don’t know

what else to do.

I stare at him.

I think I need to talk about this.

My thoughts and my words

swirl around, and I’m not sure

if I’m thinking or speaking.

I start talking about feeling distracted,

about how my body

seems like a different place

than it’s ever been,

like sometimes it’s on fire.

He seems good at listening.

Finally, he asks

if my mother

will leave.

When she does,

the doctor smiles,

asks me about puberty.

I fold my arms across my body,

look at the books on the shelf.

I want to say

I don’t know anything,

but I think about the time

when I was eight,

and tell him about when

my friends and me

saw something on the computer

we shouldn’t have seen.

We acted like

we understood

the confusing scenes,

the awful voices,

the inhuman sounds.

We all felt sick.

I tell the doctor that

it doesn’t feel like that anymore,

that it just makes me scared.

I feel like he is actually listening.

Somehow this doctor knows my questions

Without me even asking them.

One by one,

he tells me things I need to hear,

lights turning on,

pieces of puzzles

that seemed lost

suddenly fitting into

unexpected places.

Sometimes, he says,

you may feel afraid when lots

of changes happen

in your home environment.

It’s normal to feel this way, Ari.

At the end

of the hour,

he settles deep into his chair,

smiles, and takes a long breath.

So, he says.

Will you tell me what happened in the bathroom?

I don’t know. I look down,

pull my socks up higher.

It won’t happen again, I say.

He looks at me,

smiles.

It won’t, I say.

He puts an unexpected hand

on my shoulder.

Apartment Doctor

I convince my mom

I don’t need

to go to the apartment doctor again,

even though he helped me.

I should have gone back.

It’s just that

I don’t want

to think about

what happened

or talk it over.

I wish I could take

the memory,

throw it into the bay,

watch it slowly sink

into the salt water,

down and down,

washed away forever

into the cold darkness.

Another Kind of Doctor

The paper

on this doctor’s table

crumples beneath

my weight.

Food pyramids

cover the walls,

mostly green,

the vegetables and fruits

delicious in the posters.

Deep-red apples