Field Hospital by Adam Whipple

Between the tables arrayed with standard steel armaments
of scalers and picks and forceps

are a small box of teeth which will drop into history
to outlive all other bones

and one of glass vials of drawn blood like uncut garnets swirling
in earth before written time,

and a bag of off-cast fluids stippling wadded gauze
all packed away for disposal.

There’s something of us, of patients as beings, left behind,
a latent fragment of quasar

masquerading as hemoglobin and carted then
to the door of the gym fronting

the dog-day street with its chrome bustle and flecked brake dust
glinting in an urban noon.

Two hundred workers in paper surgical masks load tents,
gas pipes, and cases on trucks.

All these, as people, disappoint—their politics,
their bias, their clannish reserve,

yet in three hours, unpaid hands break down a hospital;
unpaid grins talk of weather

across all sworn boundaries, like teeth in a dug-up box,
and they shine like pieces of stars.

Adam Whipple is a musician, poet, and author living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a graduate of Carson-Newman University. His essays and poetry have appeared on The Rabbit Room, in Curator Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, The Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and Analogue. His albums can be found on all major digital outlets.