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Falling Fifth: The Neurosurgery Patient and the Anesthesiologist
based on Robert Schumann’s Third String Quartet, Movement 1
Audrey Shafer
We meet in the holding room; a paper dress covers your tattoos
At any moment, your craze of fragile vessels
could spill, fill the sea cave cradling your mind
Your wife holds your hand until it is time for us to go
I guide you as you blow through a straw
swimming across your long day of surgery
Five hours, and five more: surgeons untangle
a crevice of your brain, clamp the feeder, reassemble your skull
Perfect Timing
Linda Kobert
Monday, 7:30 am, DR two. I’m circulating,
the nurse who isn’t sterile, the surgical team’s link
with the unclean world. Before the incision,
I have ten things to do. I keep the list in my head:
check suction, position lights, turn on Bovie, toe
the steel bucket next to the surgeon’s feet.
The scrub nurse and I do the count: sponges, needles, clamps.
I chart these numbers. Post op the count must match. I snag
the tips of the ties on the surgeon’s sterile gown. He spins
Thanksgiving Dinner
Allie Gips
and for the third time my grandfather grabs the bottle of sparkling cider
and for the third time it is empty and for the third time his face falls
of all the things to forget this is not the saddest
he forgets how the trees are laid out in the woods behind his house,
forgets whether he took his pills in the morning, forgets to protect
my grandmother in the dark of the night
when he wakes to declare that the whole room stinks, it stinks so bad,
it stinks and he has to sleep elsewhere he tells my grandmother who clings
to him and begs stay with me, stay with me so i don’t grow cold
Battlefield
Pris Campbell
His heart
is a battlefield
of scar tissue
and hardened walls
from radiation.
So certain the tumor
in his throat would take him
to his knees, wrench his life away,
they brought forth
the beast…that fairy tale
of modern medicine
gone wrong…and now
New Widow
Wind scatters leaves as I approach the house.
The geranium he hung lies on the floor.
The same porch board’s loose. The coir mat sheds.
I fumble for the key and push at the door
that opens to guitar amps, music books
and cardboard boxes left by the man
who asked me not to touch his clothes
or toss the newspapers till he came home
from the hospital, sorted through the stuff
once and for all to organize his life.
Someone Loved Her Too
Sophia Görgens
The first mistake I made
was leaving my ID card home
in the pocket of my fleece–
the one with a zipper that broke
in Namibia and a hole stabbed
by a pencil during finals, worn
deep with worry and time.
Later, I asked someone else
to let me into the lab.
We made small talk in the hall.
Second, it was drizzling and my umbrella
knew not where it was. How poetic!
I mean to say, I forgot it too.
Morning lecture dried my frizzled hair,
and anyway, maybe cadavers like
the smell of rain.
Tom the Liver-Transplant Surgeon
Clyde Partin
The atypical place he wore his beeper
Warranted him a cameo appearance
In an essay I once wrote on pagers
However,
On this spring morning,
He was impeding my progress
As he sauntered across the intersection
In intimate communion with his cell phone
While I waited patiently to turn right
Taking my son to school
At five minutes to seven
I doubt he got to eat breakfast
With his kids.
Riding the Rails
William Toms
Our train starts to move slowly down well-traveled tracks. Sunny out,
clouds in the distance. We pick up speed.
We offer obligatory greetings,
courtesy How you feelings?
We both know why she’s here
we defer that talk
as if deferring for a few minutes will make it easier.
The trackside turns to trash, human detritus, rusting hulks without utility.
I edge closer, negotiating perfunctory reviews–
her history, her physical, her labs, her imaging–
she owns them, they’re hers alone.
Then it’s time to enter the forbidden room of abnormals:
machine-made “shadows,” the blood’s “too highs.”
Her cloak of woven fear lies quietly on her shoulders.
Prison Break
Jack Coulehan
I eavesdrop on the cells in your brain,
which are trying to bust out of a prison
surrounded by broken connections.
They make an almost inaudible hum
beneath mechanical whooshes and pings
surrounding your hospital bed. I listen
while sitting with your hand in mine,
not comforted by the confusion
of intensive care–I know your brain
is scheming, despite these machines
and my heartache, to escape. Its intention
is clear–get out while there is still time.