The Mastectomy Poems: 2. The Gurney
From: The Crack in Everything, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
What's this long corridor above the street
What are these glazed beige tiles
Why in my horizontal state
Am I so like an undemanding child
After they wheel me in my bassinet
Into the operating room
Who made the muslin sheets so dry and white
Over my humid body's doom
How radiant the ceiling lights, of course
They buzz appealingly for me alone
I'm special, special, to my Haitian nurse
And now my surgeon pulls rubber gloves on
And now the anesthesiologist
Tells something reassuring to my ear-
And a red moon is stripping to her waist-
How good it is, not to be anywhere