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The problem was I could see it

Katherine DiBella Seluja

The jammed hallways

packed emergency room, the ICU. 

I could feel the mounting panic in the chest 

of the staff

making it difficult to breathe.

The sweat beneath their scrubs 

and yellow long-sleeved gowns.

Their latex gloved hands, N95’d mouths

plastic shielded faces.

I could see the underground corridor

that connected

one part of the hospital to another

without ever coming up for air.

I had walked those hallways 

usually at night, often alone

carrying specimens to the lab

supplies from Central

or a freshly mixed IV solution.

The problem was it haunted me.

Didn’t allow me to sleep

and I didn’t need the extra images

when a friend sent a video clip

taken by a medical resident.

You could see only his feet 

stepping over

bundles the size of bodies. 

So many that my first reaction was to ask

Is this a hoax?

How do we really know those are bodies

and not hospital gowns wrapped

in white morgue sheets

or bags of trash

or staff playing a joke.

But we knew, didn’t we?

Katherine DiBella Seluja is a poet and a pediatric nurse practitioner. Books she is currently reading or thinking about: Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera; Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli; Home, Marilynne Robinson; In the Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forché; Goldenrod, Maggie Smith; And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey, Amy Beeder. Katherine is the author of Gather the Night and co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water. Her latest book, Point of Entry, is forthcoming from UNM Press in 2023. Katherine lives and works in northern New Mexico.

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