After the attending ordered you shackled to the gurney
and fed ash that you geysered back
like an anguished volcano —
After the medical student inquired about your scarred arms
and lectured on “liver function impairment won’t show
for another 24 to 48 hrs” —
After the technician adjusted the slow pulsing drip of your IV
and left a cup of ice chips to feed you
if you ever woke up —
I watched even the backs of your hands sweat
and thought I heard in every rattling breath
a cart pushing closer through the hospital halls:
Nurse Death, making his rounds.
~a.i.
[image via]
Beautiful and potent. I sometimes think of the smell that lives in most hospitals–perhaps its the medicine- the house where lives are ushered out and others are brought in.
Loved this line especially “Nurse Death, making his rounds.”
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Yes. Hospitals exist at such an uneasy boundary between the pristine & antiseptic and our most fleshly animal eruptions, don’t they.
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Wow. That’s really powerful.
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Thank you.
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This title? The best.
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Thanks! I’ve had the bones of this piece for many years and reworked it countless times — the title is the one element that has never changed.
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Incredible.
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Thank you! And thank you so much for stopping in and reading.
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Another winner…certainly not topically but rather in presentation. The images are vivid to me.
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Thank you — the images have seemed vivid to me, too, for a number of years.
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