Photo Credit: Karly Jones for Unsplash
The danger was not the restless gator
he cradled around Jake’s Liquor,
drunk and merry down the aisles,
twin black pearls of reptile eyes,
or the category 4 roiling the gulf
as bottles jittered in his cart,
or the store clerk’s finger on a trigger,
or the engine idling in the lot—
his pickup waiting to whisk them off
to the party where a weightless cork
would pop and strike his temple.
Woods Nash is Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Fertitta Family College of Medicine, University of Houston. His poems and essays have been published by the Bellevue Literary Review, Journal of the Americal Medical Association, Louisville Review, Academic Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, and elsewhere. He serves as co-chair of Off Script: Stories from the Heart of Medicine, a twice-annual medical storytelling event that has been hosted by numerous venues in Houston, Texas.