Eva Unwraps a Bandaid

She’s three and bleeding
From her thumb. She shows me
Where Lego Horse snagged the truck.
She asks can we go to the cabinet?

I hold her up to reach the mirrored door
To lift the metal box up from the shelf.
With one hand
She opens the lid, retrieves

What’s needed. I put her down.
She carefully tears the side
Of the crinkly paper by the strip,

Opens the wrapper, pulls the tape.
I shape the gauze around the cut
And kiss her hair. She never smiled.
Not once. Nor wept. Nor does she now.

*Hilda Raz was born in Rochester, New York and educated at Boston University. She teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln, where she is editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner. Her poems, essays, articles, and reviews have been published in books from University Presses of New England, Scribner's, Longstreet Press, Story Line Press, North Light Books, and the Bench Press as well as The Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Women's Review of Books, Judaism, North American Review, Literature in Medicine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her last two books are both from Wesleyan UP Poetry Series, DIVINE HONORS and TRANS. Two of her essays have been accepted or are published recently in CREATIVE NONFICTION and FOURTH GENRE.