Aseptic Hymn

[Verse 1]
The Number 4 bus on Division, Tuesday, 4:17.
She unwraps the Safeway carnations from their cellophane green.
The whole world is crashing, a symphony of glass and steel outside,
But in her lap, she’s setting a bone, where the living parts hide.
Each movement a suture, a tourniquet pulled precise and slow,
Against the wet wool smell and the window's afterglow.

[Chorus]
Oh, this is how you make a holy thing.
A ten-dollar prayer on the altar of what the evening will bring.
This is the sterile field, the steady hand, the intravenous line.
A stranger's vespers, and for a minute, they are mine.

[Verse 2]
She trims a brown leaf with her thumbnail, a surgical flick of the wrist.
The driver calls out Powell Street through the static and the mist.
She mouths a little something, "this one goes here," she seemed to say,
Like she’s charting a wound on the instrument tray.

[Chorus]
And oh, this is how you make a holy thing.
A ten-dollar prayer on the altar of what the evening will bring.
This is the sterile field, the steady hand, the intravenous line.
A stranger's vespers, and for a minute, they are mine.

[Bridge]
And what’s the prognosis? For the bloom, for the city, for the ache?
Does the scar tissue form for the promises we make?

[Outro]
The doors hiss open.
She's gone. The healing has begun.