Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill
- Book Review,
by Veneta Masson
Marie Stoline, RN
"A gift to the world of people who care."
From the Publisher
This nurse's poems make strong medicine and memorable stories! Like Langston Hughes' character, Sister Mary, poet Veneta Masson got her feet caught in the "sweet flypaper of life" during her 35 years as a nurse, particularly the 17 years she spent caring for "a motley assortment of patients, some of whom considered themselves family" in the rough and tumble Shaw neighborhood of Washington, DC. According to Masson, each of the poems in her new book, "Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill," contains a story. "These often began as conversations with my colleagues or journal entries written in celebration, sorrow, or frustration at the end of a day. Months or years later, when they had 'cooled off' enough to be worked into poems, they found their way into the annual reports of the small clinic where I worked and, one by one, into the literature of my profession." Soul food for caregivers and all who care about healing art, these poems are also a tribute to patients like "Aretha", who introduced her to a local institution, the Florida Avenue Grill, and taught her the real meaning of the term rehabilitation. "Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill," gracefully designed by new talent, Lisa Carey, is a 100- page paperback that includes favorites from Masson's earlier book, Just Who, which sold out its 2000 print run, mostly hand to hand.
From the Author
It no longer surprises me when a patient turns into a poem. It's often their gift to me after our relationship has matured or ended. They don't know it of course. They start by making inroads into my conversations with colleagues and then into my journal. They track through my reveries, dreams and prayers. In time, some of them--the ones whose lives changed mine--turn into poems and in the poems I find the resolution, the message, the gift, whatever they have to give me. Take Aretha B. I'd nursed her a good ten years, first in my clinic, then in her eighth floor apartment a few blocks away. We'd long since enlarged on the nurse-patient relationship. She was Ms. B and I was Nita. We'd been through her depressions and paranoia, favorite gospel songs, suicide threats, new hairdos, the roller coaster ups and downs of diabetes, her entire collection of rings, the foot ulcer that wouldn't heal, countless cups of coffee, the amputation, her woodcuts and African art pieces, bouts of bronchitis (she hid the cigarettes), her life story, and much of mine. But her death at sixty after a long turbulent decline wasn't the end of Aretha. She lived on in my heart and mind. When the poems started to come two or three years later, they held more than just our story. Embedded in each, like a pearl in an oyster shell, was one of the lessons I'd learned in our years together, lessons that have shaped me both as a nurse and a story-teller.
About the Author
Veneta Masson is a nurse, poet and essayist living in Washington, DC. A graduate of Pasadena City College in California, she also holds a B.S. from the University of California in San Francisco, an M.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle and a post- Master's certificate in primary health care from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Most of what she knows about the craft of poetry she learned in workshops at the Writer's Center in Bethesda,Maryland. The poems in this book are the fruit of 35 years of experience as a nurse, in particular the 17 years in a small, inner-city clinic she helped to found. She hopes these poems and the stories they tell will serve as soul food for caregivers and all who care about healing art.
Excerpted from Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill by Veneta Masson. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Nurses A baby's born. Its first faint cry is drowned/ in mother's tears both for what is and for/ what should have been--a perfect child. Around/ them nurses set about their healing chores.// A breast is gone and in its place a gash/ across the very heart of womanhood/ still bleeds in tiny kills. Unabashed/ a nurse keeps vigil, willing loss to good.// A beam collapsed and left him less a man./ He rattles bedrails, pelts the air with curses./ A nurse confronts him eye to eye and hand/ to trembling hand. I want to ask these nurses// Do you face the dark because you trust in light?/ Or is it that you've come to terms with night?//
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