Emergency Leave Reunion with my Wife,

Upstate Medical Center Psychiatric Unit

    by Paul David Adkins

I left for war, she

wound up wounded.

We hugged

on starched white sheets.

The mattress stiff.

Her door stood cracked.

A camera stared above.

We didn‘t care.

Patients stalked the hall,

taunted my wife with rhymes –

Mary and her husband sitting in a tree . . .

Sheets tucked tight between bedrails.

Barely space for one.

We made us fit and softly sang

a love song in the dim.

Fretting nurses skittered

past the room.

Ahem.

© 2011 Paul David Adkins

Paul David Adkins graduated from Washington University with an MFAW in Poetry in 1991.  He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been published in Crab Creek Review, Healing Muse, and Summerset Review, among others.  He lives in New York.