Exposure

What the radio says is brief, how the hospital was bombed,
how a nurse was badly wounded.
The listener imagines a tidy nurse in all white,
delicately wearing a single bandage above her eye.

What he doesn't hear is how bone splinters
into tiny swords of mineral-laden grey,
how the smell of burnt flesh makes her turn away
from her own bleeding sores.

He doesn't picture the disjointed limbs,
the wrist dangling from a single tendon,
all the dark colors clotting between her fingers,
the putrefaction of her exposed center.

He won't hear about the slow unscabbing of nerve,
the falling-away of years of training,
her diligent preparation for grim realities
cut away from her as deftly as her own stained linen.

Michelle Shamasneh has lived for the past year in Hiram, Georgia, which to her great regret does not have a bookstore. She is currently finishing up her M.A. in Creative Writing at Georgia State University in Atlanta. By this time next year, she hopes to be teaching English at a local high school.