by Jefferson Hansen
Go in fear of absolutes!
“You’re only as crazy as your deepest secret.”
Sometimes, rather,
it is the secrets that keep us sane.
Take Nurse Rivers, for instance.
She accepted a medal for her work
on the study.
Her greatest contribution
we will never know:
Did she give the men penicillin
I,
a white man
of decades
later
of Northern
climes,
imagine black people in Alabama
of her time
knew how to keep secrets
most savagely.
Observant
Hebrews eat no pork, today.
The Law began,
I assume,
because pig
meat could make you sick
so easily
in that time.
What was once utility
can become sacred.
I imagine Nurse Rivers keeping
useless trinkets on the second shelf —
more hidden there.
I imagine her smiling
gently at their crystal every day,
and taking them down every three
days to dust,
then placing them carefully back.
On all the other shelves
books
with no lettering on the spines
filled with all that has been said
about her.
She never goes there.
They are merely the frame
for the crystal.
One book quotes people saying,
“The men loved her
and she loved them.”
She married late in life.
I imagine she told this husband.
He had his trinkets,
too.
And these lines are my
Nurse Rivers,
some lines
lacking spines.
