By Rebecca Brock

We aren’t ready for how the intake’s face
falters when I say why we are here,
for how quickly a guard and an orderly
take us back, past normal hospital rooms,
to a holding block, a two-room cell— 
three rooms if you count the nurse’s station  
where they sit in shifts, watching.  

The walls are pocked and scarred
with wounds and messages.
The door only locks from the outside.
He cannot keep his notebook
because of the spiral binder.
He can keep a pencil but not a pen.
The nurse locks all our phones in a locker.  

He says his pain is at a seven,
tucks himself sideways on the hospital bed, 
his back to us, his hair a scatter, 
his body a long comma—we wait.
We wait for hours that feel infinite  
and sad. Child, I try to say, or maybe
it’s a prayer: child. 

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Rebecca Brock’s work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. Her awards include the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the Atlantis Award, and the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize, among others. Her books include The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023) and a chapbook, Each Bearing Out (Kelsay Books 2022). A MacDowell Fellow and a graduate of the Bennington Writing seminars, she has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. Find more at http://www.rebeccabrock.org.