Pink Noses

…and the places they go

I read my life story in a novel
from the gift shop of St. Vincent’s Hospital
while I ate chocolate pudding
in the waiting room. Nurses bustle
in candy colored scrubs,
through stale, windowless
hallways cleaning bedpans, drawing blood, triaging
the other empty people in the waiting room.
A doctors scratches his balding head and
replaces a clipboard, (in a hour he will
go home). You fit on twenty
one pages of clipboard, of white
blood cell counts on blue-tinted paper.
In your room, they folded
your belongings like a flag at a funeral.
Washington’s hat on your white bed sheets.
Fresh roses smile on the windowsill,
oblivious to me. I wonder
what are they thinking in their
sunny world. I wonder
about my grandchildren.
Would they have had little pink noses
that wrinkled when they cried
like yours?

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Photo by Sophia Krevans.

 

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