Issue 18: John Regan
(Tom Raworth Memorial)
The Nurse
Rational as a flowscreed, sanctioned stamped
and sent.
The constant material flush on the
palate of the lift shaft. Signing in for
aftercare with mint, with due care and at
tention to the skin complaint a recur
sive blemish of the access plant is how
she understands payroll. All pensions are
deleted all lift cars suspended un
til July at which point the sweat will have
cooled on her neck, stained the collar and star
ted to smell.
Take the laminate to the fourth floor where
the walls are warm and keep right; show your lan-
yard. The moulds of the seats were derived by
reclamation. Your pale paper pass co-
ver is a contrivance of shale and
by some margin the reconstituted
panel tempers the rubber which in turn
hammers the stanchion under the weight. All
of which is collapsable sense since
sense is a fourth-floor warm pharmacy desk
which is polished and burnished to bear. Sign
for waning Neproxin. Muscle relax-
ants to the eighth floor, renal. Dean is well-shorn
but you hate that name. Muscle relaxant
arrives via the overnight via
eurotrans you’re much too caffeinated.
The walls of the fourth floor are warm and stick
y in parts owing to poor installa
tion. A view of Denmark Hill also means
a panel of sunlight sliding imper
ceptibly across the sober commerce
of the entrance desk which is ecotex-
durable recycled patinaed grey.
Needle disposal then lunch on the steps
of the church in the piss quadrant. Looking
up confirms: the hospital is a ro
coco bog. A hall of colour where the
bag check cloys its dockets with the metal
lic smell that stays on her fingers ’til home
time. Readmission to the palace of
air confirms: this is the air she was be
fore lunch, the no-sharps sign unpeeling a
bove the mobile oak cabinet. In the
palace of air the pill cups are at least
forty percent, percent. Forty percent
of floor three is Limecyclin and four
percent of the floor is mottled polish
and eighty six percent is tufo-style
polish-proof grained topic surface. All one
hundred percent of floors three through are
metal air and washing more doesn’t help.
Warm your foot on the desperate ledge by the
vent by the public toilets refitted
In April. Already the inside doors
read:
SEIZE YOUR POSTCODE
and
EAT PUSSY SMOKE DMT
and
FUCK AUSTERITY
(yeah spend monney u don’t have instead)
Meanwhile by the wash hand basin there reads:
OUR VALUES: PERSONAL LIBERTY. THE
RULE OF LAW. RESPECT FOR ONE ANOTHER.
TOLERANCE. An ornate, zero-sugar
mission statement prescribing unpaid ov
ertime.
Out on Three and the metal smell dries by
the vent which is green and was installed last
October. Out past the foyer space two
men discuss blood transfusion; by the an
aesthetic gels the description is aud
ible through the frosted glass, one of the only
spaces which voids the smell for her with its
grey drawers of red tubes and anticoag.
A forced laugh garlands the stiffened paint on
the rim, then a cough plays around the em
bossed braille on tired orange boxes of Skin-
oren and a pinned sublet notice by
the blood cupboard. Then a faint after puff
of vape breathing around more burnished oak,
under the proviso that the requi
site sadness has been observed in the pre
cise distance carved by the entrance pass. Pure
access deems the vape trail and comfort dri
ven deep among the bare shafts of dial
ysis, tries the trade door, tries the sharps dump,
tries the gel closet with the Diamorph
by the H.R spit out, tries the extrac
tion at source; tries the nil by mouth. A bus
corrals near casualty and is spent. Hours
to come allow chronic stomach pain; from
a young age he has suffered it for all
the analgesic. Fully one hour on
ward six.
A tickle of cortisone quells the ro
tating pulse in the eustachian tube-graft
cast force, Ellesse plimsoles spattered with
fortified paint; the narrow standard of
the rococo bog is permanent sti
fling matter. There’s matter in the air, mat
ter in the percent. Matter by the side
court obstetrics, by the pulmonary
image capture by the bright fish of the
foyer. Shoes, upper- time for water- a
dynasty of trays in their clattering
matter. All her breaths retain themselves in
the grouting between light pink tiles even
in the quiet zone by the sculpture, whole
shafts of air arrest light, dedic
tory plaque; light through shafts figures the slow
calcification of the hour, her dry
ing sweat and its difficult assumption.
The lifts are tired now, the afternoon hav
ing become what it is. All that remains
to do is start on the task card which sits
on the patterned platter of the over
cover of the tempered plastic of the
table, topped out and pressed, hardened and scratch
resistant. Pressed cover of the over
time surface hardened to a waterproof
cast mould bas-relief stir-fold starch card wipe
clean cuff laminated proxy for hours
spent in slow-motion lifts whose innards are
topped out by fibre-glass moulds for heavy
duty and repeated metal stress carts.
John Regan is a Scottish poet living in Cambridge. He is writing a book called Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790.
