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Poems

The Bite

In the springtime, a zombie showed up,
breaking down our door and biting me.

Friends and neighbors asked questions,
not daring to come near,

leaving flowers, candles, baked goods
on our crooked stoop.

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Prognosis

Small birds teeter
on the wires by the feedstore.

Crows scatter broken seedpods
beneath the streetlight.

Flowering weeds crowd the dusty sidewalk,
sickly yellow or red as blood.

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Brain Scan

I slide into the MRI machine.
Sleds slide downhill, propelled by their own weight;
my movement’s horizontal, made through means

outside of my control: a man in green
scrubs bops a button, turning me to freight
that’s fed into the MRI machine.

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Song of the Body

You wake up in pain, again.
That thoracic disc twisting in on itself
like a corkscrew unable
to spiral back out of the pulp.

It’s work make-believing
your way through the long week,
bearing someone else’s dreams
on your employed shoulders.

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And What Is Beautiful

if not a healing wound?
toes missing, trans-metatarsal amputation,
remaining tissue puckering deep pink:
raw beauty in disfigurement.

He shows me pictures on his cell phone,
the toes felt doused with molten metal.
Before debridement: brown-black,
the foot decaying like a leaf in winter.

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The Waiting Room

What happened to the fish
I ask the receptionist

The plastic seaweed was toxic
She replies with a shrug

So we sit and wait watching
A string of jeweled bubbles rise

To the surface
In the otherwise empty tank

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A Cascading, it is

to watch his memory falter,
               fail. Light fades and falls. Dark
to watch his memory falter –
                             Cans of beans: gone. Toothpaste.
                             A shoe, bills, a sister –
to watch his memory falter,
fail. Light fades, and falls dark.

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BRCA1

“Am I going to die?”
Little sister, in recovery, hair splayed behind her like wings,
eyes round.
“No,” I say, “they’ll fix it.”
Twelve years ago.
She was 47, then.

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