antiBODY
An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine Main Menu Foreword Introduction At the Teaching Hospital by Dan Kraines Atrophy by Paul Blom Barnacled to the Bone by Stephen C. Middleton Biopsy by Julie Rosenzweig Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes Choke by Alyson Miller Dead See Scroll by Rich Murphy Deciding Not to Wear Glasses by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Discovery: Negative Return by Tara Skurtu Flush by Stephen Mead Fruit By Tyler Chadwick Grandmother Dead, Then Alive, Then Dead Again by Matthew Baker Hysteria by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee If Not Absolution by Matthew Baker Lack by Sarah Anderson Wood Mirena by Meagan Grant Mittelschmerz by Sarah Kersey Moon Child by Lisa Hiton pecan, rodef, clam by Susan Comninos Refugees by Walt Peterson She Cannot Let Him Go by Nancy Smiler Levinson Some Days Begin Like This by Tara Skurtu The Mechanics of Love by Victoria Gatehouse The Needle by Isla McKetta There Was Beauty in That Graph by Geralyn Pinto [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller Contributors

Exile

18022
by Lane Falcon



It takes two nurses to push the recliner
closer to your silver crib on the side
 
where the ventilator feeds breath after
copied breath into your lungs and lift you,
 
one holding the six-foot plastic oxygen
limb, the other places you in the spindly
 
cradle of my arms. This is how I imagine
I come back into myself, your skin
 
chafed by hospital air, angry-red,
your head the size of a crochet ball
 
balanced on the crook of my elbow.
So many things wrong with me implode
 
in your eyes, your mouth opens to emit
a cry I can’t hear. You arrive in a mold
 
too small to hold this cosmic injury,
and look at me to meet you, to bleed.




first published in Medical Literary Messenger

 

This page has paths:

  1. antiBODY Calvin Olsen