Hospital Room: View One
A golden door, an open room,
but no one will take your coins,
no one will carry you across.
Don’t ask anyone for succor,
as your suffering will simply grow.
Rather: keep a batch of flowers
near your door, let the place expand itself
into a painting. Someone looks in:
it becomes a wild Hopper. Lonely scene of one
or two, woman at the bend of a street,
table before the waiter arrives.
You sit, someone asks you to move the table
(it looks better on the other side.)
You get up, drift. In the light, your hair
makes a shadow above your brows.
The colors: eggplant purple,
rusted orange, blue. The wall
looks suspiciously like an ocean, as if a man
had dropped a paintbrush in the sea
and fished it out to layer on the bricks.
You’re still lying there, not moving.
The bed seems to rise of its own accord.
No museum could reckon the amount
of time spent like this, prone
under fluorescent bulbs. You might be eating
or drawing or looking to the ceiling
for advice: stay low, have another child,
make the land fertile, cover over the body with seed.
Rebecca Givens has poems published or upcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Scene 360, and American Letters & Commentary. Her website is at www.rebeccagivens.com.