The nurse reflects on the men in the room with "B" for "blood hazard" on their door. They are too weak to make love, but they still take care of one another: "as they press cool cloths to foreheads, / pass tissues for sticky green phlegm." Being only human, when she enters their room and they cough, she confesses that "something inside me stiffens." Yet she sees them as "half a butterfly on gray cement . . . . " She cares and she wants them to know that she cares, these men who "are migrating back to the cocoon, / the place where brown masks / protect the unbeautiful.