Norbert Hirschhorn
He considered the wasted moult of a once
large, ferocious creature: mouth agape,
muscles twitching with every rattled breath.
Agapé–my friend the scholar marveled
at the homograph, and the thing that feasted
on his father. He laid
Stacy Nigliazzo
When I cut the stem
I knew it was just a matter of time.
I cleared the sill
and filled a crystal vase.
The petals unfurled.
The smell of summer pierced my skin
for three days.
Rachel Hadas
“You see, the world is coming to an end,”
she says. We’re on the porch; our rockers creak.
Tomorrow vanishes around a bend.
For fifty years she’s been a family friend
whom I should really visit once a week,
now that the world is coming to an end.
Ray Bingham
The supervisor called, she’s pulling Noel to Peds,
Where, she says, they’ve got really pressing needs.
And Nadia, poor girl, must float to 12 East,
To face the scourge of the adult
Martin Kohn
There are certain days
when death is just
not appropriate
When the mock orange blossoms
scent through the window
next to your sleeping son
When your wife stands naked
at the top
of the stairs
When the day stretches inside out
and the city vibrates in doo wop
Craig W. Steele
Quo Vadis Nursing Home haunts the east side of Erie Street,
squatting opposite Roselawn Cemetery, whose wrought-iron gates
gape tauntingly wide and welcoming. Today will soon be buried:
three wizened men sit rocking, speechless, on the front porch,
yearning for the shadowed marble and granite headstones,
no
Amy Haddad
Is for pain but has a longer name
she can’t pronounce. It’s for when he shakes.
She is not sure if the shakes
mean pain since these days
he often cannot say.
Earlier when he could say,
he would mimic the circle
Madeleine Mysko
We say goodbye, her hand goes up (but not
in time to catch me), then the breach: I kiss
my mother on the cheek. Oops, I say,
you’d better wash your face. We laugh, of course–
that’s the better way to make it through
the chemotherapeutic calendar.
But it’s
Randall Weingarten
Williams brought over a bag of plums,
A tree of white blossoms,
A locomotive
And images of
Her threadbare ankles
I’ve loved his poems
The pages are all
Dog-eared now,
Tear-stained
Or
Sandra Miller
My left hand is an idiot.
I don’t think it can save me.
Deep in my brain, the old twine of brittle DNA,
the sparks of my memory and blasted circuits,
fizz
Sara Brodsky
I sit with three demented women in their nineties.
Three after-dinner conversations fly,
banging into each other,
ricocheting,
drifting off course.
Aunt Sylvia insists she must call her mother.
Edith announces she
Patricia Ljutic
A flywheel
launched from a brain
that cannot remember
three consecutive words–
two words, maybe:
“Stop kicking…”
The third word catapults with
the what and the where,
changing channels
with every new activity,
leaving my
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