I don’t know what to say
when my friend asks about work.
This woman is a doctor who hotfoots
stroke victims through the thrashing wings
of an emergency room at midnight
and then bikes home to make her children
Belgian waffles. I pour cereal
and write poems, duty-bound
only to the slickness
of milk and words…and still I run
myself into the ground most days.
How do I tell her I spend midnights
attending the call of field crickets?
How do I tell her I save no lives
but my own? Then again,
we are none of us bound
to any one nature
of healing…
Perhaps she too notices the pale blue blossoming
of a hematoma and thinks: hydrangeas.
Perhaps it is poetry making the bedside
rounds in the end.
Kelly Granito is a poet from Michigan. Her poems have been featured in Burrow Press, Midwestern Gothic, Santa Clara Review, Iron Horse Review (forthcoming), Noctua Review, and elsewhere.