In Which the Singer Becomes a Nurse – Marianne Szlyk

Title: In Which the Singer Becomes a Nurse
 
White coat thrown over a jade polyester dress,
the singer graduates from nursing school.
 
She stands with a friend,
a woman from the Gambia,
the classmate she sang hymns with
at a blind man’s bedside.
 
The singer’s smile is fixed,
the way it was when we worked together,
when we sat at desks, answered phones,
pounded out memos on the last typewriters,
 
when we blow-dried our pixie cuts, ironed our blouses,
dabbed clear polish on the runs in our stockings.
 
I wonder if she knew what she was getting into,
working at the center of this pandemic
in the Bronx where suiting up means
 
reusing masks and gowns, wearing
plastic shields and garbage bags,
laundering latex gloves.
 
                   Elsewhere in the city
doctors in private practice die
from the virus; workers who hand out
the masks, who hand out the trays
die from the virus.
 
Maybe this is the wonder.
 
The singer gets up before dawn
and comes home in the dark, 
climbing four flights of stairs
as if she were still Sister Blanche
 
the nobleman’s daughter
who ascends to the scaffold,
bare-headed, wearing white
in the last scene of
Dialogues of the Carmelites.
 
This time, the singer finds her way
to her upright piano,
to sing again.

Copyright 2020 by Marianne Szlyk

Bio:

Marianne Szlyk is a poet from Rockville, MD these days.  Her poems have appeared in of/with, bird’s thumb, Cactifur, Mad Swirl, Setu, Solidago, Ramingo’s Porch, Bourgeon, Bradlaugh’s Finger, the Loch Raven Review, Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love, and Resurrection of a Sunflower, an anthology of work responding to Vincent Van Gogh’s art. Her full-length book, On the Other Side of the Window, is now available from Pski’s Porch and Amazon. Recently she has revived her blog-zine The Song Is… as a summer-only publication: http://thesongis.blogspot.com

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