Day 455

The boy sits on a hospital bed.
He has been evacuated to Egypt.
No one is here with him:  an airstrike
has killed his father, his mother, every one
of his siblings.  How
has he been the one
to survive? He has one leg:
the other leg, too, he has left
behind, amputated without anesthesia.
Now in this hospital
they have had to remove
even more of the leg: infection
of the femur, close to the hip.
He sits, staring at the doorway
no one but doctors and nurses
comes through: he wears
a blood pressure cuff,
a pulsometer. What does it matter,
he thinks.  And wonders
whether they’ll keep on
cutting off more and more
of him – hip, stomach, chest,
arms, neck, eyes, ears, even
his teeth, even
his forehead – until
he is like his family.  Until
he is nothing.  Powder, dust, particles.