Leaving the Nurse

Of unruly patients she spoke, tossed bedpans and teethmarked wrists. Of the quiet man who shredded his nose with only his fingers, of the hospital bed where his wife swabbed around the triangular hole above his mouth. That's love, I told the nurse at her apartment. It's something, she replied. Once more I tipped the bottle and filled her wineglass, filled my own, our heads rising and dipping like buoys. And our bodies too as we weaved into her bedroom wallpapered in darkness. Afterward, while her breathing scratched the quiet, I imagined bits of cartilage under the man's fingernails, and the woman who stood by her husband while his face slowly turned into a Greek statue's— Dionysus in marble, his nose lopped off by the mallet of time. Bedsprings whined in the morning when I rose, harsh light in the bathroom. Above the giant eye socket of the sink, my face was pale as Styrofoam. Leaving the nurse was an exercise in stealth. I had to make my head vanish, my torso and limbs. There, I said with my ghost tongue, my ghost throat and vocal cords, and walked out with legs made of air.