A Blue-Lit Room
In a hospital room lit blue / By the rays entering in from the clouded sun
In a hospital room lit blue / By the rays entering in from the clouded sun
Secret / The caterpillar munching on hair / beneath your scrub cap
Some days, I only feel disillusion of the soul / that yearns for bear hugs, game nights, Nana’s pecan pie.
‘Twas the block before Step, and all through the school / not a student was stirring — no one was a fool
The clock strikes midnight and just like that, / she’s been laboring for 10 hours as expected, / time flies when you can’t feel contraction pain.
Failure was never an option for me. // Every time I fail… / I am reminded that I have let my country down.
Send us the broken, the battered, / “give me your tired, your poor,” / your torn and tattered.
Just a five-year-old kid / Yet always in and out of the hospital, / Since her first beautiful breath / Through each breath after, / With her life-giving / Yet ever-faltering lungs.
Your bones are beautiful / And your bruises are art
A man sleeps in the sun on a bench across from the hospital. On the bench diagonally opposed, across and beside him, an almost-doctor eats cold noodles.
I wish it were different — / Dying patients, struggling hospitals, overworked health care workers, / topsy-turvy economies, politicized safety precautions, and the / uncertainty / of tomorrow.
We sit in a clumsy ring / under fluorescent lights, / halfway into the allotted one hour / before we realize that we are having / a conversation born a whole decade ago.