I bring retainers
to hold her teeth in situ
while the rest of her slips askew,
and a change of clothes
though all the days she’s here
I know she will not change,
and three kinds of floss
which they won’t give her
because: hanging.
The nurses turn their backs
to this locked ward,
bored with suffering.
Merciless, this hospital
where I lay
and forced her out
and the years since,
trying to live
in the suffocating space
between our rock
and our allotted
hard place.
first published in B O D Y