LET IT BLEED – ALICE ROMANO

Everything bleeds if you think about the 
possible places the line or the brush can go. 

Twin baby girls, back in hospital two 
weeks after birth. Bird-sized babies in doll 

beds in a darkened room. Their mother 
folded into a window seat. My son-in-law 

and I trade visits—one of us always at the 
house for the three-year-old who carried 

a virus from daycare home to his sisters. 
What might have happened then, unthinkable. 

What might yet happen, unthinkable.
If you let it bleed, if you let the wash 

wash open and spread, you cover the page 
with colors that bleed into each other as 

your mind bleeds into your mind 
and you think of how to protect 

the impossible to protect, the big brother,
the twins, their parents; a son far away

with his own, private devils, and the son in 
San Francisco whose wife goes to work 

at a hospital where she is lead advisor 
to the chaplains who minister to patients, 

and she too ministers to patients who, no
matter what she does, will or will not die.