Taking Care of Time

CORTNEY DAVIS is a nurse practitioner and the author of Details of Flesh and Leopold’s Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowship; three Connecticut Commission on the Arts poetry grants; an Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal; a Living Now Body Award; the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in Non-Fiction; an Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal in Body, Mind & Spirit; and four Book of the Year awards from the American Journal of Nursing.

“How incredibly tactile, hands-on, and caring is Cortney Davis’s new collection! In flawlessly crafted poems, both harrowing and celebrating, Davis keeps body contact as she walks us down hospital corridors, looking in on lives in extreme straits (but the looking is in no way off-putting, as too many “medical poems” can be). Why is what Davis relates here given to us as poems? Because the best poetry, like nursing, is focused, concentrated, does not run away or become maudlin, tries to note every important and essential detail, strips things to their essences, and strives for order. Hence, Taking Care of Time.”—DICK ALLEN, author of Zen Master Poems and Connecticut State Poet Laureate Emeritus

• Contents Part I. Nursing 101 Selling Kisses at the Diner Mornings We Rolled Pills into Fluted Cups Surgical Rotation The Nurse’s First Autopsy Apology to the Woman in Room 23 Stoned Intubating the Corpse Angel of Mercy Falling Temperature All Night, Lightning Flared Silently Heroics Teaching CPR Women’s Clinic The Dark Marks Hooked Up Alchemy The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room Waking It Was a Good Year for Dreams Part II. Becoming the Patient Part III. The Ant’s Reprieve The Nurse’s Pockets A Patient Tells about Her Suffering Diagnosis HIV Follow-Up: Women’s Clinic Astronomy I’m Afraid of the Brief Empty Space Visiting the Lightning Struck Distracted by Blackberries On Call: Splenectomy Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter The Vocation of Illness There Are No Poems at Hospital Management Meetings Killing the Nurse in the House I Want To Work in a Hospital My Evidence Twelve Thousand Years Ago Hospice Taking Care of Time Finding What You Didn’t Expect First Night at the Cheap Hotel The Snake Charmer Author’s Acknowledgments Series Acknowledgments