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In Hospital
The slight feel of your hand on my back grounds me. Adamant she didn't want to die in one, already distended, cannot be moved. Caught in a net of cables, tubes. White uniforms, floating sharks. And I had thought it would be her heart. Stranded. Green walls, this silent white. Better not to swim here, so easy for them—her clouded-over eye, watery sick. I want to take her home. You will take me home. She will die alone. And I try not to move. Afraid to bleed.
Susan H. Case is a college professor in New York. She has recent work in, or forthcoming in: Eclipse, Georgetown Review, Karamu, Pebble Lake Review, Saranac Review, Slant, Tar Wolf Review, The Comstock Review and The GW Review, among others. She is the author of The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002), a collection of poems about mathematics in Poland right before and during the Holocaust. These poems have been translated into both Polish and Ukrainian and both translators are currently looking for foreign publishers.
