Hospital
This is the pale-eyed beautiful-as-liquor hour when the sleeping never wake but curl over the pools of themselves to drink. Among their sunken rocks, a bit of cloth, a glint of metal, shrapnel, a half-remembered thing— — the TV’s blue light, the news on, the nurse-call button limp on its cord, and you, asleep. The moon that had seen so much pressed against the windows while a gurney squeaked. A nurse came padding down the hall, then, like a heartbeat, stopped. — And I didn’t want you to die and I didn’t want you to die, as if by thinking it I could make it so. The news was showing pictures of the war and, Have you been here all night? the nurse was saying from her tray of shimmering plastic cups. She smiled like she had work to do and fixed the blinds. The television kept telling its story like none of this mattered.