My grandmother’s bed bounced high
But I lost the pillow in my hands
Four stitches in the small town
green tiled emergency room
where peering intently into the mirrored light
I was mad because I couldn’t see
Bleach your hair,
get drunk on champagne,
pretend the left and right halves of your face are the exact same,
ignore and deny it, laugh loudly–too loudly,
I notice the name on the waiting room
tab; it’s not a remarkable name,
but one I remember
from elementary school
A pacemaker and defibrillator
Sheets pressed hard with suffering
Seven fingers and one arm, gangrenous dead
Unknown liters of blood
Failed kidneys
B546 wants to die
eight years after they saved her.
Cervical-cord injuries are cruel.
For Maria it was a gunshot,
but it could have been a car wreck, a fall,
or a drunken misstep off a roof.
The reasons seemed to matter; now they don’t.
Thirty-two, alone, paralyzed, on a vent,
she mouths “no” to the antibiotics, the heart meds.
“I want to die,” she shouts
If you had told me thirty years ago,
when I took call on endless sleepless nights
on incandescent AIDS wards full of fear
on which I tried to do the healing work
of drawing blood and packing leaking wounds
and viewing films of microbes gone berserk
in lungs and brains of patients wasted frail
to postpone certain death from HIV,
if you had told me then
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