House Staff

Sandra Gustin

after Gwendolyn Brooks

By the third year of it, of putting M.D. after our names, we
stopped daydreaming of sleep, knew only the world so real,
so austere, behind sliding glass doors, in teal scrubs, on cool

linoleum floors, with beepers the latest technology. We,
some of us, remembered an earlier time, an identity left;
for the rest, this was the only known life outside of school.

Don’t know how we drove home safe after thirty-six on. We
obsessed that within each body, beneath each skin, could lurk
lymphokines gone awry, gram negatives multiplied, too late

for anything done to make a difference in the end. No, we
didn’t know one of us would die within a year, heart strike,
a suicide we dared think, not in a hospital, at home, straight

upright in a chair, with classical music, turned low, like we
played in the OR. Christmas Day, it was Bach’s oratorio. Sing
away, I thought while drawing the incision, of the cure for sin.

I don’t remember if I ever cleaned my house. I’m sure we
never heard birdsong. Some cried. Some of us got quite thin.
It was before laws limited hours. Some should have limited gin.  

How did we thrive on sleepless nights? We were good. We
reached diagnoses not just by symptoms, history, all that jazz,
but like a birder ID’s species, by their jizz, kingbirds in June,

phoebes in fall, by gestalt, by our six senses, that’s how we
recognized weekend ulcers, Monday coronaries. Don’t die
on our watch, and usually they didn’t. Only a few, too soon.