Jerald Winakur
White coat, sterile gloves
my instrument dangling
but she finally died
after such a struggle–the young
always struggle so–
I listened to her chest
till it stopped then clicked
off the machine.
It sighed for us all as the air
drained out. And the moon
was still low in the sky
so large, so round–this
is a shape I know well–
Jef Gamblee
As I stand beside the bed in Mr. Jerome’s living room, his pit bull puppy sniffs the body bag lying on a stretcher nearby. His cat curls up on the bedside shelf.
“That dog gonna be a problem?” asks Jude, one of the crematory guys.
“She might get underfoot,” says the neighbor, whose name I can’t remember. “But she’s a lover, not a fighter.”
Jude and Chuck are here to
Judy Schaefer
I was not with my mother when she died, her heart bursting
against her ribs, screaming for a violent release from her chest
I listened, ear to phone: nothing-more-could-be-done
I recall her now, prayer petals of morning’s first red rose, the perfect
Mezzo-soprano of a summer evening’s lullaby, an open window to song
Clinical colleagues
Dianne Avey
She who shows up
to guide tiny fingers
toward ripening blackberries
and the spiral
of a moonsnail shell
Late summer treasures
She who shows up
with tea and bread
all the time in the world
to walk hand in small hand
My son beautifully distracted
Candice Carnes
In 2002, I was living in Albuquerque and working as a nursing assistant. My staffing agency had assigned me to a medical surgical floor at a hospital in Santa Fe, a fifty-minute drive away.
One day, as I was enjoying the high-desert beauty en route to the hospital, a code was called.
The patient’s name was Sam, as I recall. It could have been anything, but Sam is the name that echoes in
Alia Moore
You were supposed to die of cardiac arrest as you circled toward home plate. Or of a brain aneurysm in the summer during one of your countless hikes through the mountains.
You weren’t supposed to die here. Not in a hospital bed, inhabiting this fragile new body, with an oxygen tube in your nose and tumors in your lungs.
Two days before you left us, I traveled home to visit you. I’d last
Isaac Song
I was a college freshman, just starting out as a rookie EMT with the local rescue squad. In the squad building, located near a strip mall in our suburban New Jersey town, my fellow volunteers and I joined the staff supervisors to spend days or nights on call.
On a rescue squad, I quickly learned, patience is key. If you visited the building, you’d see seasoned EMTs lounging around as if they had
Wynne Morrison
Tears should be surprising.
He is, after all, well over six feet tall,
must top 250 pounds,
always quick and confident
with a joke upon his lips.
Most of his patients weigh a pound or two.
Eyes fused shut, translucent skin,
with lives of needles, tubes,
machines and probing hands.
On this week there are too many
who will never have a chance.
Chocolate, silence, and he hauls
himself up from
Julie Evans
When Mom died of alcohol poisoning on her sixtieth birthday, I was seventeen and then I didn’t have a mom anymore.
My heart was crushed, but there was no time to grieve, because my dad was dying. A man in his late fifties, he’d battled emphysema, a brain aneurysm, colon cancer and then bone-marrow cancer.
Over the
Zohar Lederman
I am a medical student in Pavia, Italy, doing my fifth year out of six. It is summertime, and, as I’ve done every summer for years, I’ve returned to my small hometown in the south of Israel. There, among other things, I volunteer as an emergency medical technician (EMT) with Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross.
Andrea Wendling
Please for tonight
Just be my wife
She is my life, my center,
She is what makes me whole
And I am finding I cannot exist
Without her
Smell like her
Like hayfields after a day of hard work
lavender and milk baths
Warm breezes blowing through still forests
All of this mixed with the soap
That we shared
That now too slowly disappears
Touch me like she would
Like I belonged to
Veneta Masson
After she died
there was talk of war
the stock market crashed
the cat didn’t eat for three days
her youngest came home from school in tears
her husband grew a beard.
I do not lie when I tell you these things
nor do I tell the whole story.
I do not say that her funeral day dawned bright
and unrepentant
or that all the sunflowers in the city
were gathered at her
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