Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Medina: I Forgot to Bring Flowers

I Forgot to Bring Flowers
By Derrick Medina

morphine drips clear under the sixth-floor window. curtains sheer enough to make snowflakes look like stars behind closed eyelids. the heart monitor keeps the pace, punctuates the quiet. syncopated beeps shift with a flick of her glowing finger; her thin, jagged breath. i haven’t seen Lizzie restrained in my life. now her right leg is propped with pillows, a rod meeting marrow in the hollow of her femur. the night before she’s driving me to the emergency room for five stitches while we cry out laughs as the nurse sticks the numbing needle in my hand. i want to pull the thread from my palm and sew her pelvis in one piece. nine months rest from walking is too long for a girl with intentions. her hand feels like fixed concrete drying in mine. her lips crusted salt and her blue eyes half-open.

morphine drips clear. she asks me for chapstick. she can’t apply it without hurting her ribs. “more than that, damn it, you know me,” she spits through lax teeth, her fat, glossed lips. her face looks cream and sea foam like blank walls, the cotton sheets. her forehead bruised plum. i tell her she looks good, better than i’d thought. she knows the color of my lies. she slurs how the nurse man-handled her leg. nurse says you can’t say fuck here at St. Vincent’s. i say time on the back begs for t.v. & reading. i ask if she wants me to bring any books. morphine drips clear. eyelids shut. her hand feels like sifted sand in my palm.

Derrick Medina will be one of the final tenants of his apartment building before it is razed for office space development, which must be a metaphor for something. As a child, he would often pretend to prick his finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die in his mom's lap. He blogs at derrickmedina.com.