William Varner

Abecedarian Written in a Children’s Hospital ICU

Always the screech of the curtain pulled back by the upbeat nurse
bringing breakfast, orange slices my son  holds like goldfish and puts in his water cup.
Children here are wingless, nested in rooms that I’ve seen the chaplain return to.
Don’t let yourself think it’ll be him too my brother says about the girl with the stuffed
elephant who does not walk the hall anymore, steadying herself with one hand on the wall.
Forgive me for thinking too hard there but for the grace of God go I. I sleep
gnarled in the windowsill and its thin pad, bivouacked with a change of jeans.
How are you holding up is a question I’ve never heard
in the family room, the television on the same channel for days, a
jaundice of fall leaves wet against the window after a storm. It’s always the
knight another father moves first in our game of chess. We talk of weather,
low pressure systems moving in from the west. A tremor in my wife’s hands when she
makes him sit up to straighten and smooth his sheets. His lean forward, turning away
never letting her see that he’s annoyed. Eyes that sometimes I can’t tell are
open or not at night. The catheter and its bag that I can’t look at without wanting to
piss, always the way I look away when it starts to fill. Always
questions I forget to write down for the doctor in charge of the floor, my wife and I
rise when he enters our room like a judge, interns stopping their rolling laptop carts,
standing at attention to tap in his orders and dosages. Has it been nine or
ten days here? Each one bringing a new distant count until discharge,
unless things change. Always the endless shift of his
vitals like stock market prices in an exchange that never closes,
watched like it holds all your savings, which it does. Always another
x-ray to see if the brain bleed has lessened a little more. Always my pillowcase,
yellowed, and needing to be changed. Always a cigarette in the smoking
zone at 8am, each long drag held in like a plea to take me instead.

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William Varner is a poet and editor living in Maine. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Dialogist, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, The Penn Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. He’s been a finalist for the Erskine J. Prize from Smartish Pace and the Maine Literary Award. His chapbook, Leaving Erebus, was the selection for the Keystone Chapbook Series (Seven Kitchens Press) in 2019.