April 22, 2012

Jeanne Bryner, RN, BA, CEN

SAUCER

The blind cat drinks from me.

I am a circle inside another circle.

Where the stone hit I was born

and there will I also die

but not before making a little

clacking noise with my sister

and taking some heat. Someone

has to catch hell, small milky spills,

sweet brown drips.

It might as well be me

sitting quietly bearing coals

across my back.

I am what holds the brewed cup,

beauty to be broken, sighed over,

swept up and thrown away.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Tribute to Nurses

__________

Jeanne Bryner, RN, BA, CEN: “I like to wear aprons and hang sheets on the line to dry. The sun’s breath gets caught in the cotton flowers, however briefly. I was born in Appalachia, and once, I saw God do a magic trick with a veil of morning mist. My neighbor’s silo and barn were cut in half, and later they both stood up whole and unhurt.”

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April 21, 2012

Judy Bowman, RPN

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING

This is what appears on the back stage of her retina at four in the morning: an old soldier his face a rigid tragedy, his hands, talons tearing the mesh of air, her hands and arms, sliding, skidding on his rippled gray skin, as slick and drenched as rain-swept tarmac. Once she heard a rabbit dying in a snare; a memory revived by the reverberation of his groans and weeping, his prayers flung against the walls of his room. She lies to him about his son coming—yes, soon, I promise—then passes him like money to ambulance attendants. In the digital blinking of time, she asks Job’s question, wanting something more for this man and more, for herself someday. But she gets a horrifying non-answer, and at four in the morning, she can still smell his sweat on her soap-scrubbed skin.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Tribute to Nurse Poets

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September 20, 2008

Christine Wideman, R.N.

HOWLIN’ MOON

must be a howling full moon tonight because everybody is streaming through my hospital and just howling crazy after 15 years in this job there isn’t much that surprises me anymore lets face it being sick brings out the very best and absolute worst in patients and their families and it all comes to a head in intensive care.

take poor grandma here in bed-one with a little bit of dementia at home but she’s mostly functional in her own normal environment but two days in the hospital with a heart attack have taken their toll and knocked her for a loop so i find her standing stark naked at the side of her bed with a river of poop yup poop that’s what we call it running down her leg she is holding the end of her iv tube in her mouth with one hand and staring at the trickle of blood from the bleeding iv insert site on the other hand i’m going home she says this hose isn’t putting out enough water for my flowers she holds the iv tube out to me it’s flooding onto the floor here she smiles you take it oh my God honey what in the world are you doing did you have to go to the bathroom here let me help you are you ok are you in any pain are you in any pain oh no dear she answers there hasn’t been any rain oh damn i think and glance at her ears empty God only knows what she did with her hearing aids now she’s totally confused sun downing and stone deaf too great don the nursing assistant comes to my rescue and 20 minutes later she is cleaned up and put back together we are both hoarse from screaming at her she still wants to know when she can leave her sister’s basement and go home.

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September 19, 2008

Shawna Swetech, RN

MIDWIFING MY FATHER
For Brooks Staton, 1/15/15 – 6/14/05

I sit alone at his convalescent home bedside.
His eyes are unfocused, unblinking. I feel his wrist,
the pulse rapid and thready. His breath is heavy,
sharp, with a death rattle—a sound only recognized
by ones familiar with life’s end. I’ve helped deliver soul
from body many times, but not like this.
I watch the warm life recede from his hands,
tan replaced by dusky mottle. I see his heart
hammer under the sunken sternum.
I see his struggle to stay as he balls his fists,
pummels the air—grimacing and flinching.
Does he imagine it’s WWII, and he’s back in the South Pacific,
on the USS Quincy, when it was torpedoed in the dead
of night? Is he fighting his way topside again, through fire,
over fallen bodies? Or is he fending off the angels,
here to spirit him away?
Holding his hands, I lay across him,
press my weight on his chest.
Dad, I’m here—I’m here, Dad, it’s okay.
I kiss the chisel of his cheekbone, start telling stories
of good times, like watching Sandy Koufax
pitch the World Series at Dodger Stadium.
I remind him of the playhouse he built for me
in the backyard, the one that later became the Monkey House
for Dondy, our gibbon ape. I talk about other pets:
how he taught Omar, the Minah bird, to say “I’m a dirty bird!”
And our old dog, Tippy, how he’d throw himself
at the front door when the mail came.
I know he still hears me, because he nods his head slightly
after each tale.
But then he flails at the air again.
I hold him, start talking about Sunday afternoons
at Knott’s Berry Farm, how he’d give me a dollar to pan for gold.
Grunion hunts at Seal Beach. The time he pushed me along
the bumpy wood planks of the old Rainbow Pier in a grocery cart.
I tell him things weren’t perfect—we made mistakes,
but we did the best we could.
His breath gets irregular and shallow.
I tell him to let go, that Mother is waiting.
I plead for God to come help him. At 1:59 p.m.
he coughs so hard and so deep, he bends forward at the waist.
Every bit of air rushes from his lungs.
His body falls back on the pillow.
He doesn’t breathe in.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2008

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September 14, 2008

Kathleen Walsh Spencer, MSN, RN, MA

HER BROTHER’S PICKHOLE

He still wounds himself every day
for five decades now,
breakfast till bed, his index finger
spins tight circles at a spot
on his crown the size of a Cheerio.
Hunched over pancakes, driving
the toll road, typing with one hand,
the left hand always returns to his scalp,
elbow, wing of crow,
picking from road kill.

At fifty-five, hair wild and thick, he picks,
picks, then smoothes gray tufts
over the hurricane.

Half a country away,
she sees him in his easy chair, newspaper
spread on his lap, dog at his feet. Wounding.
Do dreams calm the fury?
Does a tentative scab lay down
in his sleep?

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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September 12, 2008

S Stephanie, LPN

THE TRAFFIC OF TULIPS
—for Nelson

We have waited too long
for Spring, a little sun,
any small sign
during this white of white Februaries
would sustain us,
Nelson and me.
We are tired of the chicken soup,
the second helpings of apple pie,
the bulk of our sweaters,
his detailed descriptions
of New York in the ’20s,
but in March he dies.

When the snow finally melts
under his empty window
tulips sprout without regard.
They bloom in the late April rain,
slender yet looming
fire, fire reds,
only a handful
are school bus yellow.
If they were traffic
they would clatter incessantly
across the potholes,
in the Spring winds
if they were buildings
they would seem to sway.

Only the dead take too much with them,
the other half of a memory,
as if that cart Nelson drove
delivering dry goods to the outskirts
of the city, its horse were now gone,
halved in the stories of his children,
quartered in the stories of theirs,
and so on, until it becomes nothing
but a white line in the algebraic pie
on some faded blackboard
in a one room schoolhouse
that seems to sway.

And only the human dead
leave too much behind
in the way of old clothes
one can’t forget them in,
clutter and bottles of expired pills
everyone wanted so badly to work,
the shiny yellow capsules
flushed and floating
along the city sewer now,
vivid as those memories
we search to see him in,
holding up his rough hands
that planted so many
raw, red tulips.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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September 11, 2008

Anne Webster, RN

DRY DROWNING

He comes walking into the ER, holding
hands with a wife and a little boy.
A big guy, he’s wheezing like
a pump organ in a country church.
“I’m thirty-five today. It’s my asthma.”
I put him on a stretcher, start inhalers,
page the ER doc, get an IV going,
shoot some epinephrine, but the dumb
galoot stops breathing. Laryngiospasm.
I grab a lung man who’s walking by.
He intubates, and I squeeze that ambu bag
like a pastry chef icing a wedding cake,
but the man’s lungs aren’t getting air,
his blood pressure rockets. Now his heart
flutters, stops. We pump his chest,
shock him—again and again—nothing
but a straight line. Ten minutes after
he arrives we pronounce him. His wife
and kid wait in the lobby, expecting
him to amble out with a birthday grin
ready for songs and cake. What they get
is me and some strange doctor, our faces
wearing the news. On the drive home
at midnight, I count each breath I take,
waiting to see if there will be a next one.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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