Dorinda Wegener: The Nurse and the Not Knowing

Poetry by Dorinda Wegener
THE NURSE AND THE NOT KNOWING

I went to bed in a ballgown the night I found myself
like the body of my Lord: gored through by the ongoing
intrusions of this world. Don’t bring a knife

to a gun fight, squalls the low level jet as it rips
asunder and drags the night storm out.
Past the coal yard, the tremor of an incoming freight

grows in its own cacophony, like chants,
or wild fires, the local duster out over pastures,
death we consume. And my friend once inquired if I’m afraid

to die, to come a cropper with, but it’s not the if—
my mother gifted me baptism: water and Spirit
it’s just the how: an affinity to blades, also given—

the nurse courting her own shameful curiosity, my own
fixation on incursions and the precise wounds they leave
behind. What are the left living to do, but witness.

At puncture’s lip: see how the flesh curls
inward as a wave cresting itself. Its own wake
foams over a fist clenched shaft, and iron

refluxes through esophageal sphincter, heme
courses into oral cavity, blood boxes uvula, escapes
the labial commissure… such terms science has

for coughing up a life. And today I learned
my friend’s house was completely razed by flames,
red as the centurion’s Christa. How it ends:

the glass slipper; the Prince; the lead projectile; the Santa Ana;
the railcars; the prayers; the aircraft; the ammonium phosphate;
the Marys at the feet; the morbid curiosity; the not knowing

how to fix it back; the ocean; the medical jargon; the Roman’s lance
bucking as if in fornication; such is rapture: Truly
this man was the Son of God—

Dorinda Wegener, a 2024 Poets & Writers Magazine Get The Word Out Participant, is a Peri-Anesthesia-Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, VA, who holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College, where she was a Joel Oppenheimer Award Recipient. Wegener’s debut book, Four Fields (THP 2024), won: Honorable Mention for the 2025 Eric Hoffman Poetry Book Award; shortlisted: 2025 Eric Hoffman Grand Book Prize; Finalist: 2025 First Horizon Poetry Book Award; and Semi-Finalist: 2025 North American Poetry Book Award. Her poems and essays can be found in LitHub, THRUSH, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Ethel, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Hunger Mountain. www.dorindawegener.com