Courier

The nurse walked my kidney from my opened
body to his, over a bridge between surgical wings,
beams with eyes to look in on the sick. Eight hours
later she would be home, while the night-nurse
checked my catheter and brought two Percocet
in a paper ramekin. Those minutes, while
one doctor stitched my stomach in three places,
and one doctor made new branches in my brother,
she walked the spine of an angel, a space between
he lives and he dies, a blur between rolling beds,
paper gowns, my body outside of my body
in a stranger’s hands at dawn, under fluorescent
light. She, the last prayer there was to make.