Readable Hospital Information Leaflets For Elderly Patients Poem by Bernard Henrie

Scented with African Bird Peppers
and leaning in to a third afternoon, first month
of a recluse year, my neighbor looks on wistful
as an overweight high school girl.

She's been dumped, assigned
to our flambeau colored sanitarium.
The faux brick pillars of the day room,
beds that open and close like clam shells,
perpendicular corridors content with themselves
like the interlaced fingers of a priest.

Tropaeolum vines garland her shoulders
and ginger cheeks, the blue veined copper feet,
beige skin tinted by an ancient Kenyan sultanate.
Contralto in the African Methodist Episcopal church,
she corrects her rare words with the nurse
and moves her lips reading the hospital pamphlet.

The little finger pokes out when she holds
a tinctured fruit drink, studying the glass
as though assaying gold, the tonsured head bobs
as a telegraph operator might snap a metal key,
a shimmy off her aluminum crowned pate.

And as the overhead fan turns on we lift our soup
without a sound, dwindling light and speechless night,
a radio at bedtime like an eddy of silver moon.