Wynne Morrison
A man a few feet ahead of me
is pulling a rolling carry-on,
a clear plastic “belongings” bag tied
to the top by a white drawstring.
I can’t resist a glance in the bag,
like a stranger who wonders about lives
Cortney Davis
The minutes dragged. She worked at it–
sweat pooling in her frown, her lungs
bellowed in and out as if the air were oil.
Her expression never changed.
Beneath the light,
my mother’s skin looked violet.
Nolan Snider
People say it’s the last place
They want to go.
But when push comes to shove,
It’s the next-to-the-last place.
Although there are some who are
Ready to move on to that last place.
Others stay as long as they can
Ginny Hoyle
I walked through my mother’s madness
in a coat of hungry colors.
Her eyes did not take me in. I was a child.
To win her, I hung by my knees from low branches
of the family tree, voicing nursery rhymes
from
Rachel Hadas
The bull between whose horns I perch is life.
The bull between whose horns I cling is death.
Tossed on these horns who bleeding dies
Or doesn’t die but bleeding, hanging on,
rides, and the bull charges through late winter
as through an
Kristin Laurel
It is the night shift, and most of Minneapolis does not know
that tonight a drunk man rolled onto the broken ice
and fell through the Mississippi.
He lies sheltered and warm in the morgue, unidentified.
Behind a dumpster by the Metrodome
Anne Webster
Since a doctor gave me poison pills that left
my heart a swollen slug, killed off my bone marrow,
set my lungs to clamoring, I can get brain-freeze
without eating a snow cone. When I walk
my neighborhood’s knotted streets,
based on Robert Schumann’s Third String Quartet, Movement 1
Audrey Shafer
We meet in the holding room; a paper dress covers your tattoos
At any moment, your craze of fragile vessels
could spill, fill the sea cave cradling your mind
Your wife holds your hand until
Linda Kobert
Monday, 7:30 am, DR two. I’m circulating,
the nurse who isn’t sterile, the surgical team’s link
with the unclean world. Before the incision,
I have ten things to do. I keep the list in my head:
check suction, position lights, turn on Bovie,
Allie Gips
and for the third time my grandfather grabs the bottle of sparkling cider
and for the third time it is empty and for the third time his face falls
of all the things to forget this is not the saddest
he forgets how the
Pris Campbell
His heart
is a battlefield
of scar tissue
and hardened walls
from radiation.
So certain the tumor
in his throat would take him
to his knees, wrench his life away,
they brought forth
the beast…that fairy tale
Wind scatters leaves as I approach the house.
The geranium he hung lies on the floor.
The same porch board’s loose. The coir mat sheds.
I fumble for the key and push at the door
that opens to guitar amps, music books
and cardboard boxes
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