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Poems
The Morning After You Died
Dianne Avey ~
So this is what it feels like
to be on the other side.
Hollowed out exhaustion,
rimmed with the chaotic clutter
of struggle and hope.
Like the beach after a tsunami,
all those once-important items,
now floating around uselessly.
I don’t know how to start this life
again.
This morning, they came
and took the bed away.
Walking Each Other Home
Allie Gips ~
Winter in New England and
night replaces afternoon, darkness wraps the streets while we are all still inside.
There are no windows in the Emergency Department anyway
except of course the window into this city–the stream of women with bruised arms
and orbits that they will not explain, the revolving door of opiate addicts
nodding off, crying out, praying for forgiveness, the chronic-pain patients who rip
apart all of your idealism and ambition, trade it in for a one-time hit of oxy.
Gabriel
Karen Ross ~
The new parents,
both rabbis,
have dark circles
under their eyes.
Instead of davening
with prayer shawl,
at each sunrise,
they are drowned
in diapers and breast milk.
Or maybe the drowning
in diapers and breast milk
is the prayer.
Their newborn was created in a lab,
with life cells engineered
by white-coated scientists.
The miracle baby is named
for the angel, Gabriel.
Native Ways
Jan Jahner ~
They came up from the center of the earth, The People
where sky speaks to corn,
speaks to cottonwoods, to runoff in the wash.
Living beneath black-slashed canyon walls
home to sheep and weavers.
He is one of them, my patient
one of the ancients; leathery face carved and quiet
she is his daughter, fingers on the covers,
ready should he wake.
He is dying and we can’t say it.
Soft sounds unknown to me, their language of wind, cottonwood and wool
in the center of this circle is knowing and not saying
the medicines continue
but we turn, bathe, suction and weave the fibers close.
This Is Not a Drill
Daniel Becker ~
At work there are three kinds of drills: fire, earthquake, shooter.
During a fire drill the building empties into the parking lot
where crowds kill time and blame the fire marshal.
The smokers want to smoke but don’t.
A doctor talks to the 2:40 patient and tries to stay on schedule.
If communication is the heart of medicine,
diligence is its best habit. Then he looks for the 3:00 patient.
In a 5th floor office the photograph of a storm-tossed schooner
is 10 degrees off plumb because that wasn’t a drill.
What I Keep
Melissa Fournier ~
Inked footprints on paper
a one-ounce trial size
of Johnson’s Head-to-Toe Baby Wash
one-quarter gone
a striped receiving blanket and knit hat
folded inside a clear plastic bag
zipped to preserve her scent
a vial of holy water
one-third gone
a dried white rose entwined with baby’s breath
two hospital bracelets
one sonogram picture at seven weeks
three sonogram pictures at twenty weeks
a urine-imbued double-pink-lined stick
which I hold like proof
the way Thomas held out his blood-
and-water-soaked finger
after removing it from Christ’s
pierced side
The Dark
Francie Camper ~
Parkway, three a.m. Ambient light.
Try to shake off the sleeping pill.
Open car window. Rock station 104.3
Watch the divider, the white line.
Count the other cars on the road,
make up stories to stay awake.
Don’t miss the exit for the Interstate.
Don’t miss the Willis Avenue Bridge.
Twenty-six minutes to a parking space.
Forget to read the parking sign.
Shoulder heavy bag: water, apple,
book, journal, healthcare proxy.
One desk and three doors into the
emergency room. Ask the first
person. Ask the second. The third.
Oh she’s in X-ray, it’ll be a while.
Erasure
Thomas Nguyen ~
Consider what remains: chipped yellow
paint, roman candles, wilted gardenias,
so many photographs. Accept that
time makes things distant, that his
absence doesn’t bleed into your memories
as much as it used to. Try harder and
harder to remember the last time
you saw him, cords wrapped around
his legs like snakes, all white
and black, hidden underneath
neatly-pressed khakis. And my melanomas,
he once showed you, with a smile.
Post-Op Poet
Judy Schaefer ~
How can I write a poem, nurse, in this pelted room? Nurse? Nurse!
Memory loss, southern pine–nurse, this is not a poem-writing-room
The floors ooze resin at your footsteps
Spanish moss, from every wall
Spongy trod of medical students
Surgery went well, anesthesia lifted
Cologne of betadine, a boarish root for a vein
at the same time each morning. I welcome
the lady of the mop–tincture of mossy pine
back and forth, she says her prayers. She is my alarm clock.
I peek from crusty eyelids and dread the washcloth
Back and forth–path and path–room and nurse
How does one begin a poem? How to start?
Anesthesia has lifted long ago
I try to remember how I got here