Ward

Waking

Curtains sweeping, ineluctable fulgent disc’s bombasity, squinting

Sweet meat smell like pineapple-fucked pork

Nurses fostering instruments in a bowl tray on wheels

Big hall without partitions, can tell by the roof, gymnasium maybe, no hoops or icons of vigour

Images of consecrants, newly hanged

Lime coloured soaps dirty from the last man’s mawley

Prints on it like

Sickly smell of clean dirty or dirty clean, bleach algaeing the contents of an unflushed jungle toilet, 1944

A grid of suspended ropes with sheets hung over them, hundreds

Partitions, hemisphere, cubicles repositories scabbards coffins

Partitions with little space between but running along and beside them corridors

Running vertically horizontally diagonally, for the doctors and nurses

For the bodies to be hauled out, swollen with trench things

Adrenaline poisoned I cannot feel fear

Bounding between shell holes, bullets singeing near

Hand raised as if pushing open doors

Parting vapours: mustard, ammonia, tear

Screeching like a pitchcapped man

Arm curled upward my sidearm by my ear

Doctor lurches in, apron like a butcher’s

Glazed in ichor

Peels off and discards scarlet gloves

Pale forearms, band of flaking pink his gloves had sized him for

Draupnir many rings