End Notes
River
By Marilyn Aschoff Mellor, M.D.
Some days
bears come to stand
in cool waters and swipe
at salmon swimming past.
*
Some shifts
I shove off
from the ER stunned.
Carnage left behind
by sharp claws clouding
my brain, tearing my heart.
A toddler battered, barely
breathing, a child plunged
into scalding water.
*
Sometimes
I feel like a three-eyed
woman caught
in Picasso’s Guernica,
blood and bulls and bears
everywhere,
and people streaming by,
unseeing.
Marilyn Aschoff Mellor is a pediatric emergency physician at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.