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“Sheltering in Place for Beginners” & “As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room”

Tina Carlson

Sheltering in Place for Beginners 

 

Are you awake? You have relied on anesthesia during

the scapel’s trusty removals. In the ice melt of morning 

 

sit still, read jokes. Wind predicts drought. You will grow 

strong in your heart’s ribbed hospital. Become the blue

 

rising up over your bed. Wake to smell a skunk, 

touch the skin of breath. Enjoy the crow’s caw 

 

from their branches. Under the spruce, taste something salty. 

Let loneliness grow feathers. In your brain, an amygdala 

 

howls through cracked glass. There she hunkers, 

memorizing danger. Embody the lost lover’s voice, temporary 

 

as an amber sun before the heavy machinery of night. 

In enviable dark, shake the hand of sleep and let go.

 

As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room

 

Dead leaves still staunch 

on stalks are like moths, breathing

 

the green light of spring: moths

that silken the lamp, flap the bulb,

 

harmonize in the night’s

wind garden with hum 

 

and drumbeat of wings.

I was once a moth 

 

folded in some book yellowed

and torn, so close to mouth

 

in the wet bed of imagination.

The woman who died

 

holding her child’s hand, is now 

moth, like all the dead, turning 

 

the page of this day with 

their numbers, rooting

 

for juice, for the lost shelter of skin 

and cracks of light through the sill.

Tina Carlson (she/her) is a psychiatric nurse practitioner living in Santa Fe, NM. She is currently reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. She has published two previous collections of poems: Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM Press, 2017) and, We Are Meant To Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), a collaboration with 2 other NM poets. A Guide To Tongue Tie Surgery is forthcoming in spring 2023 from UNM Press.

A PORTFOLIO OF WRITING BY NURSES: TABLE OF CONTENTS • Tina Carlson • KD Seluja • Sally Helmi • Christine Riley • Jane Slemon • Renata Bubadué • Diane Kraynak • Geraldine Gorman • Charles March III • Mary Ann Thomas • Sarah Comey Cluff • Brenda Beardsley • Shirley Stephenson • Nicole Aicher •  Amanda Reilly • Angela Todd • D. Liebhart

In 2021, well into the Covid pandemic, The Other Editors of Fence, Sarah Falkner and Jason Zuzga, issued "A Call for Writing by Practicing Nurses" that circulated widely, the text of which you can read here.

In Issue #39 and here online, we include the resulting portfolio of essays, poetry, and witness across the nursing specialties. The work offers us hard-fought wisdom, raw emotion, beauty, and no easy answers. This is a Covid-era Fence space of encounter between the art of nursing and the art of literature, for literary writers and nurses to meet, learn from each other, and cross-pollinate through words.

You can read an introduction to the work by Sarah Falkner, here.

Contacts: Emily Wallis Hughes and Jason Zuzga at fence.fencebooks@gmail.com