AFTER THE SNOW THE RAIN.

A MAN AND WOMAN IN A LOCKED WARD OF A PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC IN 1971.

Yiska sits on the sofa staring.
Music on the radio, background
noise. Naaman walks the length
of the locked ward, right hand
in his dressing gown pocket.

White bandage, blood stained,
wrapped around his left wrist.  
Avshalom’s razor did the job
unsatisfactorily, he muses,
feeling the soreness where

the wound’s wrapped. Yiska
taps the sofa seat and beckons
for Naaman to sit beside her.
He sits down, hands on knees.
She’d found him in the locked

ward washroom wrist slit,
blood drenched. She talks to
him, low voice, muttering words.
The nurse at the desk eyes them.
Slit wrong way, Yiska says, the

Romans had it down to a fine art.
Naaman senses the wrist throb.
He smells her soapiness, wants
to wrap himself into her. Some
deem it a sin to take your life,

she says. Doesn’t matter a f**k
once you’ve gone, she adds, tracing
a finger along his artery. More
ways than one to go, Yiska says,
reaching the bandaged wound.

Naaman says, I know, I tried each
in turn, failed me each. She smiles.
That hanging s**t was a no no, she
says. Need to go beautifully, not
boggled eyed with protruding tongue

like some rabbit hung. The nurse
takes his hand and feels the bandage
hold. She unsmiling looks at both,
their conversation dumbed. Naaman
senses the nurse’s hands trace a

line around the wound. Unimpressed,
she moves away, eyed by Yiska’s dark
stare, watches the nurse talking to
another standing there. Makes work
for them, Yiska says, no feathers in

their caps if you break through to the
other side. Naaman sniffs her soapiness,
warms to her nearness, seeks to dissolve
into her otherness. Sylvia had it off to
pat, Yiska says, head in the oven dozed

to a death. Sylvia? Naaman asks, his eyes
skimming along her thigh where night
gown showed. Plath, she says, the poet,
back in 63. Naaman drinks in her dark
valley where her night gown gapes, his

black dog mood barks in his brain. Look,
Yiska says, pointing her finger window
wards, after the freezing snow, comes rain.