A Still Melody
Long ago I was a nursing student
and brought a body to the morgue.
Tucked in the corner, placed
at eye level, were two packages.
Someone had written:
twin a and twin b.
Listening, there was no sound—
no one was dreaming
or pressing the inside appendages.
No one was speaking across the ether.
When we die, our mind is forever quiet
after life is spent in water’s presence.
Sometimes, I wake to a still melody,
and I’m unable to watch early light make its attempt,
casting across the bedroom wall,
playing a static station.
Closing my eyes,
I hold the burden.
There is a shore
beneath the sheets
where I drifted
until it jutted,
where mourning is a hymn I repeat.
If I look into a stone idol,
I might see the sun rise
over her pubic bone—
Her shape so all the world
has enough.
Overnight Nurse
During your heart’s procedure,
each artery and vein was emptied,
and afterwards, they were
refilled many times.
Here you are with me,
full of ocean, saline,
with limbs aching, we swim.
Morning has yet to sink the high rises
out the window.
It will arrive doubly quiet and billowing—
A sphere and a manometer,
an inhaled and exhaled tracing,
a drip titrated with steady increments—
All caps black markers
label the viny tendrils that enter
your arm, your neck—microgram
per kilogram, per minute. But you are drifting,
your face and body hidden behind
a dimly lit curtain. All that is visible
are your many hands,
your many names,
unreadable by any identifier.
A Bedside Inquiry
What have they placed into your torso?
What is reaching your heart and dwelling there,
listening? Its lumen hears a farm horse,
windy-haired, contently gesturing,
retreating from the canyon side,
from an entrenchment that is a mile wide, not falling—
What is listening for an eruption?
For the kicking stones along the cliff’s edge?
For the sun, swollen,
fluid-like, full of soothing?
Maureen Kelly is a poet and registered nurse from New York City. She holds an MFA from New England College. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Ascensus: Journal of Humanities, and the anthology Some Stories are True that Never Happened.