One Line for the Whole Room

Abstract

This poem is written in the imagined voice of a hospice social worker completing an advance directive at a patient's bedside. It concerns a feature of the instrument rather than a failure of practice: the form provides one line for one proxy, while the deciding it is meant to record is being carried out collectively by the family in the room. The poem declines the vocabulary the form supplies for that mismatch, and it sets against it a second bedside in which the same single line was the only protection a patient had from a family that had already chosen for her. Coercion is shown to run in both directions. Its subject is the practitioner who holds the pen, and who converts eleven people into one name because the chart requires a name by nine.