April 22nd, 2022
Children’s Hospital
by David Banach
Children’s Hospital
My fingers gentle graze her pale and shaven head.
A vise of six tapered insect legs keeps it immobile.
Canvas smooth, her skin, a checkerboard of black,
child-like hand-drawn lines, with electrodes embedded
at the interstices, inscribed to map out paths
of electric storm seizures.
Myoclonic they said was the word
to describe the clench of the body rolling
forward, head banging
against her plate on the table.
I remember the IV needle searching
for her small veins, puncture poke,
again and again, red dot records of failure.
I hold her hand and she watches
patient, with trusting
tear-filled eyes. The thing is―this was kindness.
This was care, this unthinkable cruel
science, and I have since regretted that I was able
to keep living
having seen it.
David Banach reads “Children’s Hospital”:
David Banach is the father of a daughter with epilepsy. He teaches philosophy in New Hampshire, where he tends chickens, keeps bees, and watches the sky. He has published poems in Symmetry Pebbles, Hare’s Paw, and the Poets’ Touchstone, and was a Pushcart nominee. He also has a poem, “Resurrection,” in the COVID Spring II anthology published by Hobblebush Books. He is a Poetry Reader at Passenger’s Journal.