Veronica Tucker
The Triage Window Beneath the Lake
They open it only at night,
the square of water set
into the emergency department floor,
cold light trembling across the tiles.
The lake is older than the hospital.
Some say it knew the first clinicians
who knelt beside its edge
asking which lives could be saved
and which were already leaving.
When a nameless patient arrives,
the charge nurse leans in close
and asks the water to speak.
Tonight it answers with a darkness
so dense it dims the monitors.
Then a ripple forms,
a brief pulse of silver
shaped like a life not yet lived,
and every clinician holds their breath
as if witnessing a prophecy
they are not prepared to follow.
The surface stills again.
We wait for instruction
that never comes.
The lake only reflects our faces,
blurred and wavering,
as if reminding us
that uncertainty is also a verdict.
_______________
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her poetry explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the unseen forces that shape daily life. Her work appears in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, The Berlin Literary Review, and The Book of Jobs anthology from ONE ART. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and shares more at veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
Author’s Notes/Backstory: This poem grew out of moments in triage when medicine feels less like problem solving and more like listening, when answers do not arrive on schedule. The lake became a way to hold the history, weight, and uncertainty that exist beyond protocols and training. I used spare language and concrete clinical details to ground the piece, letting the lake carry what cannot be explained. The ending turns toward reflection rather than resolution, acknowledging that in emergency medicine, uncertainty itself often becomes the final answer.
Editor’s Comments: My first thoughts were of the pool of Siloam, which contained “healing waters” administered by the “Great Physician.” Blue is the color of pure clear water, so the abstract image of blue ellipses (by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay) might convey a multiplicity of orbits as metaphor for all the possible decisions a physician might have to make, which might be difficult to make. Which choice/path is better? Sometimes there is no simple answer, if there even is a concrete answer.