Billie Dee

Like the Movie Brazil

They’ve got the IV in, crash cart ready, someone’s yelling
for O-negative blood. I can hear everything, even the monitor
stuttering out my rhythm.

But the transfusion’s delayed. The name on the requisition
doesn’t match my wristband. Not quite. Protocol, they say—
can’t start it until the paperwork’s correct.

I’m bleeding out on a stretcher in the ER of a hospital
I worked in for twenty years. I know these people, trained
some of them. And still, they hesitate.

Not angry. Just stunned by the surreal elegance of fate: Death
by Clerical Error. Like all the others—wrong dosage, unread lab,
the surgeon whose cell phone is out of range.

Nothing personal.

Billie not Billy
the body still trying
to spell its name

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About the Author

Billie Dee is the former U.S. National Library Service Poet Laureate. She earned her doctorate at University of California at Irvine, has won numerous poetry contests, publishes online and off. She lives in the Chihuahuan Desert with her family and a betta fish named Ramon.

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