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Disaster North
Tuesday morning, Marcus holds his shoulders like a question mark. The intake nurse
marks the calendar: Thursday—property destruction.
She’s never wrong.
This is what the body learns:
to taste copper before the lockdown bell,
to pack your things before anyone says transfer,
to know which overnight staff will pretend
the camera’s broken, which therapist
will cry in her car, who will quit by Christmas
by the way they hold their clipboard in October.
Home Visit
You passed the limits
of my knowledge with your
most recent diagnosis, pills and prods
now the specialist’s domain. I hold
your hand and listen. My stethoscope
curls in my pocket, dormant
as a sleeping cat.
Biopsy
Either nothing
or leukemia or nothing or
multiple myeloma or nothing
a tumor, the long needle, the shattered
bone, the blood cell count, the EKG, the EEG,
nothing, the cyst, the rash, the clot, the scream, the sigh,
the “let’s just be sure,” the “let’s rule it out,” the “this may pinch
Still Cold
On his birthday, my father tries
to eat osso buco with its tiny marrow-spoon.
He scrapes at the shank, a felled tree trunk
on his plate, raises the shreds to his lips
until we cry out, watching them spread
over the table like shame.
To My Son, Stillborn, January 16
Your death seared my cells,
fired them with you;
in one way, you left
me as your body slipped
from mine, 41 years ago,
but in another way, you
entered me;
Catching Cold
It’s sleeting outside but
I slant through the slashing
Slivers of ice unscathed
An old woman is waiting inside
Saying you’ll catch the death of you
As she hands me a heavy blanket
Another Husband in the Waiting Room
From the sixth floor of the surgery tower
two blocks from a frozen Lake Michigan,
I can see a small lighthouse but no boats.
The overcast lake is speckled blue and white
near shore, but far out on the horizon, it’s dark
like a new bruise before the healing begins.
Common Cause
Sitting before me
I measure his scars and record the beatings
He is broken
Not just his teeth and back, his will is shattered
I ask his plans should he be granted asylum
He has none
Time & Again
COVID wards 2020-2021
For the sake of the present / let’s just admit that thigh-deep mud & poison gas & running into machine gun fire / still belong to us all the glass-eyed / survivors who said sundown was almost worse than morning slaughters / night when stretcher-bearers could finally reach the duckboards / run toward the day’s groans caught / on barbed