Tag: Hospital

• A Visitor’s Guide to Free Coffee

  When you spend enough time in a hospital—
  as a visitor, not a patient—
  you start to learn a few things.

  Like how the coffee costs more
  at the first-floor café
  than it does on the second.

  But it’s free in the fourth-floor ICU,
  where there’s an honest-to-God espresso machine.
  Outpatient surgery on three
  offers a complimentary pour-over.

  And if you befriend the nurses,
  they might let you slip into the lounge,
  where snacks and caffeine
  cost nothing.

  You’ll learn other things, too—

  Like how, one afternoon in the cafeteria,
  while drafting a poem you might call
  A Visitor’s Guide to Free Coffee,
  a young mother and her son—
  his head bald from chemo—
  will walk in.

  You’ll watch his face light up
  over a bowl of cereal
  and feel ridiculous
  for thinking about the cost of coffee
  in a place built to save
  the most vulnerable.

  The boy will beam at his mom,
  thrilled by the simple gift of Cocoa Puffs.
  She’ll smile back—
  brave, bone-tired—
  and lean in to kiss his pale scalp,
  her whole world on the edge of crumbling
  behind those worn-out eyes.

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  Note: A version of “A Visitor’s Guide to Free Coffee” was first published as a prose poem at Six Sentences — July 2025.

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  July 27, 2025

  Hospital, ICU, poem, poetry

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• Magic Doors

  by Phoebe and Nick Allison

  Fluffy pink unicorns dance on rainbows
  while long-lashed dogs wear flowers like fur.
  Soft green Yoda-lights sway overhead,
  framing my second-story window
  where moonlight spills onto the bed,
  silver-casting quiet shadows.

  I drift,
  carried across a calm sea of sleep.

  At dawn, I wake in a brighter room—
  its sharp light hums like a secret.
  A blue shark swims
  across a storm-tossed whiteboard
  before the bed floats gently down
  a river of tile.

  Magic doors open, a deep breath,
  and then—nothing.
  Quieter than dreams,
  deeper than memory.

  When I surface again,
  the curtains sway, soft as whispers,
  their patterns slip through the mind-haze.
  Family waits, voices steady, smiling
  as I slowly return to my body.

  A kind nurse guides me to the chair.
  Its wheels sing toward the elevator,
  to the car,
  and then,

  Home.

  Whole again,
  though I never truly fell apart.

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  Note: This poem was first published in Issue 3 of Poems for Tomorrow, a poetry and art journal that shares creative work with patients in hospitals and care facilities. Their mission is simple and good: to help people feel connected, loved, and heard during hard moments. They put together anthologies of poems and art that are placed in hospital waiting rooms, senior centers, and long-term care units—places where a little beauty can go a long way.

  “Magic Doors” is a chain poem co-written, line for line, with my 11-year-old daughter, Phoebe, during the days surrounding her surgery to repair a severe double fracture in her left forearm. Both the radius and ulna were shattered, and the repair required rods and a full-arm cast. The poem tells her story through the eyes of three rooms: her bedroom the night before, the pre-op room, and the recovery room. It’s about resilience, imagination, and the strange kind of magic that shows up when you’re stuck in a hospital and still trying to feel like yourself. She’s an amazing, kind, empathetic, and creative kid, and I couldn’t be more proud of her.

  They also published Phoebe’s original painting, Stargazing Cat on a Beach at Midnight—an acrylic-on-canvas piece she made for her grandfather while he was in the hospital recovering from throat cancer surgery.

  Please check out Poems for Tomorrow and support what they’re doing. It’s a genuinely cool and meaningful project.

  

  

  

  

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  March 31, 2025

  books, childrens-poetry, family, healing, Hospital, kids-poetry, poetry, writing

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