OMENS | Ryan Boyland
A moth flits around the room,
favoring the exam light, shining
as it is, useless, aimed at the wall.
“That’s a bad omen,” the nurse says.
I’m not superstitious. I’ll call a night quiet
without hesitation. Crip walk on cracks
all the way from the hospital to the parking garage,
mother’s back be damned. But something
about her voice ties a thin string of doubt
around my heart. The moth lazily crosses my face,
unbothered. “I think that’s a bad omen,” she says,
again, and the knot grows tighter.
A man who was speaking to me an hour ago,
who had strong feelings about the temperature
in his room, who was telling me how
he had too many drinks—that’s why he was dizzy,
that’s why he hit his head, that all this fuss
was for nothing—clung now to life
with every lurching respiration. Breathing tube
in his throat, crusting vomit cornering his mouth,
blood spilling from his right ear.
When I leave the hospital, his husband is
at bedside, stroking his hand, ignoring the blood,
ignoring the faint smell of bleach, a kind of cleanliness
that makes my skin crawl. The artificial,
encroaching on the pure. When I get home,
I lie in bed, spending the next hour checking
his labs on my phone, scrolling, because
while I am awake, he is still alive.
The next morning, I avoid every crack.
A family of moths silently orbit the light
in the stairwell. The knot is so tight I can’t breathe.
I walk by his room and see the blood
is gone. The linens are fresh.
His bed is empty.
Ryan Boyland is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, wanderer, doctor and amateur astronomer based out of Denver, Colorado. Boyland and his work have been featured on Button Poetry, Poets and Writers, Nebraska Public Media, with the Nebraska Poetry Society, and Larksong Writers’ Place, as well as in Rattle, Omaha Magazine, and The Cookout Literary Journal. Recordings and performances can be found on YouTube and TikTok. Read more about his work at ryanboyland.com