Member-only story
Sick
A poem
The drastic scoreline shredded any hopes for the outcome.
I left early, behind me
my empty seat and an absence of cheer,
walked halfway home, remembered you weren’t there,
so walked to the shoreline but still felt that something missing
so kept walking,
until you felt near.
Stuck on the wrong side of the hospital door,
I wait for the nurse to buzz me in.
She does so with familiarity towards this gesture,
forced smiles and awkward greetings like worlds don’t end here daily.
Her day was good, she says.
A winding hallway leads me through this shining white labyrinth, dragged, magnetised.
Your room was recently sanitised, the
chemical smell burning in widening nostrils,
the hallways, now behind, and distanced by a door,
feel empty and haunted
but the barrage of square-wheeled trolleys and
light Skechers footsteps filled with bruising feet
make it seem more likely that there’s a circus just outside.
