By Shawna Swetech
Color of oxidized metal or the brown
of fungus on a rose leaf. Stainless steel
won’t corrode, neither will plastic. But once,
I ran my finger over a spot of powdery bronze
on a cast-iron skillet, marveling how the color
stained my skin. Then, decades later, that rotation
in the ER during nursing school, when a young man
came in hemorrhaging from his mouth, a few days
post-tonsillectomy, spitting copious volumes of blood
into a pink washbasin. We ran his gurney down the hall
and straight into an OR suite for emergent surgery
before he bled out. Afterward, I couldn’t stop trembling,
had to step outside into the cool morning air
before helping clean the exam room: the burgundy
splattered walls; the fishing of paper towels
from the basin of coagulating, still-warm blood.
I’ll never forget the sickening glisten of floating fat,
the blood’s metallic odor, like copper or rusty
iron. How the large, soft clots moved
against my gloved hand—the roiling horror
of that very close call.
Shawna Swetech is poet and recently retired RN who spent 35 years as med/surg nurse.