when I knew them, if I knew them, but I didn’t know
them, but I did. One ninety-something who had this
stuffed cat cuddled into his armpit and I remember

holding his hand and thinking of an ex I missed
like a death, and when he left this world, he left his
velour cat, and I asked the nurse if I could give it

to another patient who’d lost her teddy bear and
the nurse asked, How do you lose a teddy bear?
but she’d managed to do it, and so I begged for

the cat, but she said if family claimed it, they’d
have the rights to it, but family never came and
the cat just kept sitting there on the empty bed

and we needed that space for another patient,
so she said I could give it to her, and I brought
it in, and asked if she liked it, and she said that,

no, she loved it, and she held the cat like she
was holding on to life and she was holding on to
life, and life is a cat with nine lives and we lose

so many of them so quickly, and I remember her
sound asleep, snoring, with that cat having fallen
on the floor, so I picked it up, and went to put it

back on her bed, but her eyes were open, and she
said, Please don’t take him, and I whispered, no,
I was just putting it back near her neck and she

said, Please, please don’t take him, and she
started crying, and I said, no, no, he’s here,
feel him; I pushed the cat into her neck, but

she just kept crying louder, saying, Please,
please, please, and I realized she wasn’t
talking to me, but was talking to God or

Death or herself or the world, something
else that was bigger and more important
than me, and I crept out and I remember

how dark the hallways could be in that
ward, how it felt, sometimes, like I was
walking in the infamous tunnel that we’re

supposed to see when we die, as if I had
been transformed there every night shift,
this hole to the netherworld, with moans

coming from all of the rooms around me
and I had no idea how I ended up there,
a sort of Charon, ferryman to the dead,

and the hospital floor in the nighttime
resembled a river, and I wore all black
scrubs, because they were the easiest

to clean, but the hardest to tell if you
had blood on them, which is why so
many of the nurses wear white and

they were angels on the far end of
the tunnel and I walked straight for
them, silent, walking like the dead.