Member Poem

I’m pacing in the waiting room.
Again.  It’s always again, and again,
and I’m walking in the same rut
I’ve dug in the hospital air
a hundred times and more.
She did it again, the ley lines in her palm
have split like fault lines,
joining the ones that trail up her arm
as evidence of past tremors, past trauma,
reminding her that the end is coming.
Reminding me that the end is coming.

And now the doctor comes out
of that door with Hell’s welcome sign
blazing in neon, Emergency Room,
blood red, and his left hand is shaking,
blood red, could he stop the bleeding?
Please tell me the hundred eleventh time
is not the last in a long line,
and he cannot answer the question.

Published in the anthology Heron Clan VI.