Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song

We reconstruct lives in the intensive care unit, pieced together in a buffet dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man in a three-month coma from a Buick and a brick wall; a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet; a prominent socialite, our own nurse, shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”; the gallery of veterans, succored, awake, without valves, some lungs gone. Splicing the meats with fluids seasoned on the dressing room table, she sings “the bump gone” refrain in this 69-degree oven, unstuffing her twin yolks carved from the breast, the dark meat wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper; the half black registered nurse hums her six years in an orphanage, her adopted white family, breaded and primed in a posse, rising in clan for their dinner. We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light meters: race and sex spooled and rungs in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home.