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Medical History [1]

Fiction [2]
9.1.21

“I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man / who’s had sex with men. I can’t sleep,” writes Nicole Sealey in her poem “Medical History [3],” selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts to be published in the New York Times Magazine. In the poem, Sealey lists the speaker’s and their family’s medical history, creating a startling portrait of genealogy and the anxieties surrounding mortality that come with it. “Uncle Ken, wise as he was, was hit / by a car as if to disprove whatever theory / toward which I write. And, I understand, / the stars in the sky are already dead.” Write a short story in which the protagonist contends with their medical history. How does this fixation on their health affect the way they move through the world?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/medical_history

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/medical_history [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/fiction [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/magazine/poem-medical-history.html