August 30, 2016

strange brew

No one told you it would be like this: a Monday night, pulled
from the reverie of a Netflix documentary and into the theater
of a hospital hallway and the cluster of the wounded waiting there.
You watch the medics wheel in a woman with no socks on; her husband
trails the gurney, carrying her shoes. Minutes later, a newborn
with a troubling rash on his cheeks. A waitress clutching her elbow. A young man's shoulder
bent at a Neanderthal angle. No one is prepared, and yet, as the hours toil on,
the lines between your stories blur, and each time the orderlies come by,
you gaze at each other in a strange brew of hope and surrender, your bodies caught
in a private stillness yet reaching out, in wild and tender innocence, to dance.