NVN Saturday: WARNING SHOT

by Catherine Gonick

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday named eight doctors and researchers, including four who have spoken out against vaccination in some way, to replace roughly half the members he fired from an expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. —The New York Times, June 11, 2025

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I go to CVS to get a Covid booster.
A pharmacy staffer prepares the injection.
Do you think we'll be able to get
these much longer? I ask.
Is this a political question? 
she shoots back.
We are strangers. I realize 
she might be asking 
if I'm MAGA. Maybe she
is. But if either of us were,
would we be here,
giving and receiving
life-saving help? Is this political?
I repeat inanely. Battle-lines wait
to be drawn, and I'm lost
in a small fog of war,
until she asks, Have you heard
what's happened to the CDC
and vaccines? Now I know
we're on the same side
and it's safe to answer, Yes, 
we're in a horror movie. She jabs
my arm and I flinch. You need
to stay still, she warns,
plunging deeper. When I leave
and thank her, she smiles.

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her first full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming in June from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works in a company that slows the rate of global warming.