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
Jessica Bloom
The young woman’s daughter
is shy and beautiful.
Her mother comes to the clinic
with vague complaints:
headache, stomach pain,
fatigue, weakness.
A small, sturdy woman
with an anxious face,
her square
William Toms
The patient is a 61 yo M with a Hx of NIDDM, ASCAD, HBP, COPD and CHF who presents with chest pain radiating to his jaw and both arms for thirty minutes,
Tabor Flickinger
At the coffee stand as always getting tea,
so always that the ladies see my weary face
and start the water steaming without words.
I hover there with others waiting think through labs to check
imaging to glance at does he have pneumonia or pulmonary edema
has social
