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Teaching the Wound
Joanne M. Clarkson
For LS
Assume pain, I tell them, the young, the
minimum-waged, those who work the midnight
shift with no chance for stars. We lean
over the bed of a 93-year-old man with advanced
Parkinson’s disease. His face is
frozen, even his eyes don’t seem to move
unless you watch the sheen. These
student aides are to turn him, bathe and lotion
his stiffened limbs. After they roll him silent
and awkward as a rug, I notice the bandage
discolored with seepage, covering his left
calf. The notes had not mentioned
Unreturned Pages
Doug Hester
Exhalations materialize in the dark as I walk
from the empty parking deck. I brew coffee,
then print a list–our census is up to thirty.
I grab my coat and start seeing patients:
the gastric bypasses, the nine ex-laps,
the psychotic panniculectomy patient,
and the bowel obstruction we are watching.
I page just before six to ask about his diet,
but you don’t answer me, so I move on,
jotting ins and outs, celebrating flatus.
Knocking on the Whipple’s door, I think
of you suddenly and my gut spasms,
smothered by the weight of living like this.
I page again from the ICU, staring at a phone,
wondering if it has finally gotten to you, torn flesh
with no one to hold pressure or throw a stitch.
november
Allie Gips
tucked into the chaos of the emergency department
is a single room with stirrups, a floor spackled with blood,
& a woman whose face betrays nothing.
the bodies of all those i have touched who have then
died pile before me like so many broken eggshells
so i stand against the wall to distance myself from her
& her cramping uterus, her dark red clots that fall
like sleet, her blank eyes that stare strictly at the ceiling
while we busy ourselves with machinery: the speculum,
Imperfect Farewells
Judy Schaefer
I was not with my mother when she died, her heart bursting
against her ribs, screaming for a violent release from her chest
I listened, ear to phone: nothing-more-could-be-done
I recall her now, prayer petals of morning’s first red rose, the perfect
Mezzo-soprano of a summer evening’s lullaby, an open window to song
Clinical colleagues reported massive myocardial infarction
I reported that I was an orphan
She Who Shows Up
Dianne Avey
She who shows up
to guide tiny fingers
toward ripening blackberries
and the spiral
of a moonsnail shell
Late summer treasures
She who shows up
with tea and bread
all the time in the world
to walk hand in small hand
My son beautifully distracted
The Bodies Green and Blue
Krupa Harishankar
Reflections from the anatomy lab
overlooking Central Park
Reluctant, the same green
light over that copse of trees
and sheet of lawn glares and
bends through the lifted-open
cage of ribs, branched veins,
and cragged spine. Exposed,
my hands appear on the gurney
as a child’s. The one across
needled grass applauds small
palms, not distant, but sound
mutes here. Joy does not carry
heft like limbs of the corpse
before me. In layers of blue
latex, the uniform tint of a pond
rendered from afar–its depth
imprecise–I glove and delve
into the viscera, leaving this
abdomen a cavity. I wonder
what hands have touched you.
Schrödinger’s CT
Barry Saver
To be
And not to be…
Indeterminacy
May not be
So bad
Without this scan
We won’t know
If you’re living
Like the rest of us
Or dying
On a more compressed schedule
Once it’s done
You’ll be a zero or a one
Are you sure you want to know?
No Prospect
His uneasy truce with cancer
was shattered by
the seizure,
awakening confused
in a side-railed bed.
He lies quiet, astonished
by the speed of change,
still hearing echoes of
his home.
I sit silently by his side
as he reads the ceiling tiles,
the monitors,
OT
Maggie Westland
I have a dance routine all in my hands, with steps
To take to make them bend again, at least to stall
The stalk of past abuse, of joint and sinew overuse
This jig more intricate, more complex, more diffuse
Than simple shuffles of the well-shod foot, requires
Both patience brute and gentle force to stake its worth
I dance five times each day twice daily bathe in wax
Or wrap socks full of rice from wrist to finger’s tip
Twist, push, press on in rhythmic jerks response