Poetry By Veronica Tucker

Joseph Gage CC



Copy Forward

Substance abuse.

Drug seeking behavior.

Poor historian.

Noncompliant.

Failed outpatient treatment.

The note survives longer than the body sometimes.

Copied forward
from hospital to hospital,
year to year,
until no one remembers
who first wrote it.

The patient says the abscess started after the shelter lost power.
The chart says manipulative.

The patient says the pills were stolen from her coat pocket
while she slept at South Station.
The chart says denies.

At the bottom of the page
someone accidentally leaves in
He appears older than stated age

Meanwhile, in room nine,
a man carefully folds his discharge papers into fourths
before placing them inside a plastic grocery bag
already softened from rain.






Fluorescent Morning

By morning
the withdrawal has quieted enough
for sleep to finally arrive.

One sneaker hangs halfway off the bed.
The telemetry leads bloom across his chest
like small white flowers trying to hold on.

Outside the room
someone laughs too loudly at the desk.
The night shift has crossed into that hour
where people start laughing
at things that are not funny.

On the tray table:
two unopened crackers,
a bent straw,
a phone charging beside a photograph
of a little girl missing her front teeth.

The sky beyond the parking lot
has begun turning the color of old dishwater.

Soon there will be discharge paperwork,
a ride that may or may not come.

But for now
the room is quiet except for breathing
and the soft electrical hum
of something still trying.



Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her work explores medicine, stigma, motherhood, grief, and the fragile ways people continue surviving. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her writing appears in ONE ART, Rust & Moth, The Berlin Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The House as Witness, was published by Quillkeepers Press in 2026.
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