By Grace Lynn
When you lie sleeping
in a bed secured to the wall
by the cable
of a nurse’s call button,
I count my worried fingernails.
They exceed the weeks we have left
to waste in this room,
so I distract them with
deleting the posts
from schoolmates who want you
to be a porcelain doll with
a broken wrist and
get well soon.
Early evening moonlight
shimmers across disposable bags
that trickle you tears of diazepam,
and the light surfaces numb
as it glides up the wall.
Near the end of her rotation
we order your kind nurse
a berry parfait in a plastic cup.
She rests her swollen ankles
on the foot of your bed
and I massage arnica into them.
On her right shin,
she has seven freckles.
She tells us this
is how she remembers
the shape of the Big Dipper.
The playful half hour
slips away from us
like spring rain;
I long us to
pour it back into the sky,
but you’re nodding off again
and I don’t want to disturb you.
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.
Artwork by Satish Bhakta