The nurse

 

Charts and forms, she says,

are greater burdens than pulling people

from festering messes of gangrene

and cancers and bacteria,

tragedies that will never catch me.

 

She leans over a microwave bowl

at the nurse’s station for a midnight meal,

eyes blurred by ink.

 

I will be saved by this woman

who reads between the lines.

 

Published by

Patrick Dobson

Patrick Dobson was founded in 1962. He is a writer, scholar, ironworker, and poet who lives in Kansas City, MO. He is author of two books with the University of Nebraska Press, Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains (2009) and Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer (May 2015). Dobson is a work in progress until termination.

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