Celebrating National Nurses Week – BLR Writers
In honor of National Nurses Week, we’ve curated writing from nurses across BLR‘s issues. Enjoy!
Writings
The doctor tugs the fleshy lobe, pulls up
and back, the canal thereby made straight.
Enter his probing speculum, its light a triangle
on the drum. Pearly, uninformed, it waits
for the otoscope’s puff of air. Like a sheet
snapped by tiny chambermaids, it flaps,
teased by air to test its worth for sound:
those words we long for—a whispered oath, a lie.
A trickster, the ear. Making us believe
what eyes deny or hearts might doubt,
the narrow bones inside like a sparrow’s
in flight, willing to trust the slightest breeze,
the one that sings Yes! I love you!—
as if words might mean exactly what was heard.
Oh, the risk, the fragile wing.
“How do you do it? How do you watch people die day after day?”
He asked the question as we passed each other on the threshold of his wife’s room. He was leaving after having said all the goodbyes that could be spoken with words. I was arriving, the night-shift nurse gone and my arms stacked with towels, washcloths, and a gray basin. As every death necessitates, I was to perform a final washing for my patient. Scarcely an hour had passed since her husband had lost his partner and best friend, and somehow he emerged through his grief to ask a question that I, myself, still struggle to understand.
Over my mound of supplies, I met his gaze. “We just do,” I replied. I couldn’t tell him the truth, not then, there wouldn’t have been time to explain…
Quietly, they concede,
leaving pennies
at your feet.
Clove oil at your bedside.
A constellation of symbols
etched
across the grease board
like cave scrawl.
In your palm, a withered
blade
of split stone. Fluted reeds
like hollow wings in flight…
When she’s out of money again, flat broke despite
her frugal coupon clipping, she shoves the unpaid power
and light bill to the back of her mother’s hand-carved
maple desk, closes the drawer,
and starts a project from whatever can be found.
She’s good at drawer closings, discounting
what can’t be figured on paper. The day her husband died
at the lake leaving three small kids and one on the way…
I hug the South Lawn Road
as far as it wanders so I can find his grave.
Tiny and gray, a woman I do not know
waits next to her car while I park by the pine
that marks the family plot.
I smile briefly in her direction
as she watches me cross the road.
No salutation, she just starts
I couldn’t come yesterday. . .
my husband,
she nods to the left, a field of rusty war monuments.