Policemen pose like plastic toy soldiers,
point rifle barrels in every direction,
ghetto bird’s spotlight glints off helmets.
Ambulance allowed across yellow tape,
diesel engine grinds up the sharp grade.
In no moon you glow fish white belly up,
streetlamp casts mottled shadows,
your
Breast budding, spring leaves,
twelve, too young for babies,
she grasps her pillow to her belly,
the smell of the first crocuses,
the last cardinal’s song
echoes from the hawthorn.
The lemons whisper in her ear
before she squeezes, rubs
the
I can not change the color of the sky.
The texture of the rain, the distance of a star
must needs be fixed by ancient ritual
unaccepted by our modernity.
I can not change the length of your night.
The number of hours, the days of your life
are set
4:57 am, Sunday
This week went
from caring with hope
for a lucid patient to facing
reality in advocating sanity
to an insane extended
family to haggling with specialists
to giving up time
and again telling Mary
she was dying and then watching
her cling to her lost life like
My matched set of nonagenarians
is almost two hundred years old
and nearing escape velocity.
They are failing to thrive with a vengeance.
They have outlived everyone
except the powers of attorney
for whom they are a source of consternation.
Their constipation is prune-proof.
They scratch where it itches till
Come Medicine Buddha
Come shine your rays upon me
Penetrate deep within my body
To quell my queasy stomach
And soothe my aching bones.
Let those golden arrows
Shoot deep within my frame
Extinguishing the round tumors
That live inside of me.
Like a pool cue poised and ready
Aim
Surgery finished,
I finally sleep
Pushing my shoulders,
the technician wakes me
“Come now, we need
a chest x-ray”
Smiling, she pulls me
into position
The x-ray machine
tight against me
Finally getting a chance,
I ask what she is doing
“Oh,” she says “I have
the wrong one
You
Veneta Masson
In Latin it means care,
conjures priests and temples
the laying on of hands
sacred pilgrimage
sacrifice
the sickbed
invalid and
solemn attendants.
How far we have come.
Today’s English
has neatly expunged
these purely human elements.
Cure is impersonal, consequential
unequivocal, sometimes violent–
the annihilation
of the
Elizabeth Szewczyk
I couldn’t erase their words,
catch the breath atoms, stuff
them between lips,
couldn’t raise survival rates,
lottery odds dependent on cells suctioned
at the precise moment.
Your chest thumping, frantic,
valves siphoning warmth, drawing
cold through vessels, to your feet
Muriel Murch
I remember
The women of Victoria Ward.
The laughter of Liz,
before there were good prostheses
before falsies
left, right or bilateral
were built into the cup size of your choice.
Pacing the corridors
and knitting.
Ready to go home.
Building her strength
with a strand of yarn
Alex Okun
You were right.
That IV was no good.
Looking at his arm all swollen like that,
I thought, “That says it all.”
I’m sorry we kept bothering you.
“Please don’t wake him for vitals,”
You told us.
Sometimes we don’t see the signs.
I was hoping she would
Addeane Caelleigh
We used to trade off,
she said.
He hated trees dying in our living room.
I always loved the blue spruces
decorated on my December birthday
But his father fell near theirs
dying in their living room
one childhood night.
So we’d have a year with tangled lights,
