All articles filed in True Cut

Chrissie’s endless / Sisyphean sentence— / the insatiable cycle / of haemo-dialysis— / is finally done. / For today.

time is not the great healer / that some would suppose: but rather a dealer in counterfeit truth / a practiced deceiver in layers of story

The tangle of tubes that’s kept Chrissie alive / for the past seven days, now scares her to death

All through a long, lonely, longing night’s vigil / Jo is engulfed by a darkening ocean / of grief, guilt and shame, swept / out on a rip tide of rising despair

Listen: / the theatre suite’s in trauma: / withdrawn, and silent.

Rise and fall/  And rise.    And fall/  Now slave to a rhythm/beyond her control/  Arms stretched wide/  in trusting surrender,/Chrissie waits…

Arms raised, face masked/Jo scrubs, gloves and gowns. Tries to prepare:/a sorcerer’s apprentice invoking powerful forces,/his body becoming, increasingly tense

Curled on her side,/cocooned in pain a/slick of cold sweat/on her ashen face,/Chrissie waits,/while, with/white coat and Janus /faced mask, Jo puts on/a compassionate/carapace.

To begin then, at the beginning,/with a team—of a sort./A surgeon, and apprentice/brilliantly lit,/like moths round a flame,/both teacher and taught/drawn to the wound,/ and the instruments’ glint.