​Hospital, Indiana


Phil is so restless, Air Force vet, 
big black beard, hates hippies 
though he looks like one.
“Flag-burners,” he calls them. 
From war he learned: “Life changes fast.” 

As tech support Phil has seen every corner
of this hospital, pulled every wire.
Hear that scream? Burn patient, little girl 
in physical therapy, breaks Phil’s heart.
Want a poker game? Always one in the morgue.
Walk into the autopsy room, you might see 
a doc pulling parts from a man’s chest 
like lifting the head gasket on a Jeep.
“Death never changes,” Phil says. 
“And it sucks.”

In the recovery room where people go after surgery 
this hippie nurse is changing an IV bottle over one man
when another goes into convulsions 
so the nurse drops the bottle on the first man’s chest 
and he grunts and passes out while she runs
to the spasm guy. There’s no other staff.
Phil says, “Um, I’ll come back later
to fix your terminal,” but the nurse with big dark eyes 
makes a pleading face, so Phil holds the bottle. 

That night he sees her waiting for a bus
clutching herself like a freezing gypsy in tears 
because the guy with convulsions just died 
so he gives her a ride home but first
he takes her bowling, she needs it. Life changes fast. 
Turns out they both love bowling, 
who’da thunk it? 

A peacenik and a flyboy. 
Hospitals heal people, sometimes. 
“Now we got three kids. We all go bowling.
Good karma, ya know?”

First published in Fifth Wednesday