The Sister Wakes with a Tube in her Throat
2006
After
the Christmas tinsel was taken down, after
the Mylar balloons began their slow sag
from ceiling to hospital tile, the sister
woke with a tube in her throat. A plastic tongue
reaching into her, its ridged grooves smelling
of her long sleep. She could not speak
of her hunger for sugared bread, of water,
of the itch on her fractured right ankle. Of how
she remembered
the rain-dark street, headlights, the sound
of glass glittering the ground. Or how
she remembered nothing
after the field, the taste of grass in her
mouth, how its earth-sweetness filled
her nostrils. Among the cards and potted plants,
the rosary wrapped around her
wrist, the tube snaked through her, the whole of her
mouth too small to contain the rising
and falling of a breath not her own. The air
caught in her teeth, bruised
past taste buds and soft palate, the tube
humming its artificial lullaby
through the tonsils and tongue where
her mouth’s red floor opened into the dark.
