Kevin McIlvoy

Privacy Curtain

Nurse said to draw the privacy curtain around the resident—
said, It makes the resident’s world larger, do you see?

Because I couldn’t see, she said, Lie down, young man,
and pushed me lightly onto the other empty bed, and took a

step back, smiled as my neck and hips and knees lowered.
She said, Look at you. I’ve already made you—I’ve unfolded

and spread and smoothed and tight-tucked you like layers
of bedding, and have turned you down neatly—that is what we

assigned do, who are the assigners, too. We join you in
the cradle holding your changing form. We learn you.

The rustling pages of the old resident’s breathing subsided—
his life-leaving sound was his only tongue and was, now, mine.

Pretend, she said, that you are small and still, and all
who aren’t the residents of your world will have to draw aside

their wonder-horror with their fists in order to look at you, tiny as
a flax seed fallen there from some nonresident’s chin or apron,

as quiet and as inhumanly venerable and vulnerably
human as anything you’ve ever seen from a distance higher

than any distance you have known or dreamed.
The curving sounds of the curtain rings travel through

and through you and the residents to whom we are
assigned. Our opening faces are the stunned

curved faces of lilies the full sun has moved beyond
the furthest possibilities of last-blooming.

What are you doing, love? This isn’t the time for you
to nap—get up, Nurse said. Come outside now. We’ll have

a smoke in the lot, throw our butts at the new electrified fence
to test the limits of the charged fields of darkness.

And I’ll button my blouse so you’ll look at my old
face. Gaze as long as you wish. I assign you this.

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Kevin McIlvoy lives in Asheville, North Carolina. His most recent poems appear in The Georgia Review, Consequence, Willow Springs, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Barzakh, The Night Heron Barks and other magazines.