Each day in hospital I wake

to a reading from The Book of Screams.

It comes, apparently, from the bathroom

situated two-thirds of the way along the hall.

No one talks while the screams linger.

I pass the time by counting in my head.

Thirty-five. Seventy-two. One hundred

and nine. Two hundred and thirty-one.

The screams are high-pitched and continuous,

as if she has been chosen for her ability

to hold the note, to produce abrasive chords

when her lungs must be almost airless and empty.

The ruckus shakes the thin partition around my bed,

it rattles the cups and saucers in the kitchen,

and threatens to shatter the high frosted panes

of glass that leach feeble light onto the floorboards.
At midday and again in the evening I reluctantly

listen to recitals from The Book of Screams.

Afterwards, the ward is sombre with silence.

By the third day, I cannot bear it any longer,

I tear the bandage from my eyes and march

down the corridor to see for myself, drawn

to the noise the way iron filings are attracted

to magnetic north. Two nurses cradle

a young girl, supine, in a bathtub.

Her eyes are closed, her lips collapse

into an involuntary O that corresponds

to the coordinates of her mouth. Her skin,

though I am not sure you can still call

it that, is the black of newly laid bitumen.
Impossible to comprehend agony—

to understand how one scream seems

to necessitate another, to grasp how a voice

can travel over rice paddies and rubber plantations,

under jungle canopies and down boulevards

resplendent with French architecture, before lifting

into the flying arches and buttresses of the mind,

until we are all dwelling in a cathedral of screams

whose substantial form cries out for mercy.
But I have no mercy to give. I gaze

in dumb horror at her right leg, where

the white ghost of her femur shines

through murky water, at the charred

oozing mess of a knee. Her body is

no more than a diaphanous veil hanging

between this world and the next.
Later, they tell me about the morning

of the bombing and its aftermath.

Now, when I hear the word napalm,

I remember that girl’s face,

her eyes opening as I turn

to leave, her raw cries staying

with me and spiralling outwards,

forever travelling, like radio waves

rolling end over end

into the windless chasms of space.