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The Women of Victoria Ward
Muriel Murch
I rememberÂ
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 yarnÂ
Tumbled upwards from the empty cup
against that scarlet scar
beneath the bodiceÂ
of her bright summer dress.
I rememberÂ
Winnie’s eyes
watching feces pour
in a torrent
down her abdomen
searing her flesh
until I bathed her body
changed the bed
and wiped away
her tears.
We named thatÂ
foolish pink protuberanceÂ
her own John Thomas.
Her slow, shy smileÂ
heralded victory
for the moment.
About the poet:
Muriel Murch (//livinglit@earthlink.net/“>livinglit@earthlink.net) graduated as a nurse in England in 1964, adding a BSN from San Francisco State University in 1991. Her book Journey in the Middle of the Road: One Woman’s Journey through a Mid-Life Education was published by Sybil Press in 1995. Her prose and poetry have been included in several anthogies including Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (Kent State University Press, 2007). Muriel continues to write stories and poetry while tending her organic farm and
Apologies
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 stay home longer,
That you would have had more time together.
She liked starting school every September.
She loved that backpack.
I’m sorry it always took so long
To get into the room.
I’m sorry I took so long to call you back.
I liked our long talks.
If I say “we,”
Then maybe I’m not to blame.
We don’t know why some children
Develop this complication.
We don’t know why
The brain is so fragile,
Yet so enduring.
That’s not very nice.
We don’t know why
It happened.
I know you had some ideas.
So did they.
Remember the time
We didn’t start the dopamine?
She pulled through that fine,
Amused at our discussions.
Or the time
We got the antibiotics started so fast,
And his blood culture grew out
Only a few hours later?
Those storms down South were nothing
Like what hits you every day.
The levees
Tree Years
Addeane Caelleigh
We used to trade off,Â
she said.
He hated trees dying in our living room.Â
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.Â
So we’d have a year with tangled lights, a crooked stand
he sometimes helped me put together
Then a year with presents stacked on the corner table,
with no dry needles to sweep.
Turn and turn again
a solstice pendulum.
A ring for each alternating year
That was before the fog that eats my life,
some years feast, none famine,Â
always a forecast of more
She says, I think nowÂ
he’d welcome any tree, any year.
About the poet:
After many years as editor of the journal Academic Medicine, Addeane Caelleigh is now associate editor of Hospital Drive, an online journal of literature and art published by the University of Virigina School of Medicine, where she is also an administrator and a teacher of faculty development. Addeane is also curator of Reflections, an interdisciplinary humanities exhibit series at the University’s Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.
About the poem:
“Tree Years was prompted by thoughts of how chronic disease insinuates itself into
Running Out of Metaphors
Howard F. Stein
His rapidly metastasizing cancer
was not his only problem:
He was not only running out
of life, he was running out of metaphors.
Metaphors had sustained him
for the four months since
they discovered the spot.
He started outÂ
losing weight as “The IncredibleÂ
Shrinking Man”; then he became
Gregor Samsa for a while;
briefly he was the consumptive Violetta,
soon followed by Ivan Ilych.
He even remembered Susan SontagÂ
and Solzhenitsyn and so railed
at his wasting. He leaped
from metaphor to metaphor the way
a stone skips over water. He asked
all the questions everyone asks,
but felt no comfort from
the answers.Â
Companions and kin beset him
like Job’s friends. He graciously refused
their unctuous offerings, their leaden words.
Thinking could no longer save him.
His only balm now was his love for his son.Â
He had at last found something that had no metaphor:Â
This time, love would have to be enough.
About the poet:
Howard F. Stein PhD, a psychoanalytic and medical anthropologist, is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, where he has taught for nearly thirty-one
little black boy
Jimmy Moss
little black boy
sit down.
fold your hands into your lap
and put your lap into order
now cry me a little song.
sing me a little note about meÂ
caring about what you care about,
then dream me a little dream.
and when your tears turn into
oases and exposed rivers
stand up
and pour me a little cup
fill it with every broken promise
and the unfulfilled moments of
belated birthdays and first days
of the school year when your
clothes were unkempt…then
tell me a little secret
about how–you wish your father
bothered enough to be a fatherÂ
or fathered another version of you,
so that you could have a friend
and then
write me a little poem.
make me a little rhyme about
the places you lived and the schools
you’ve attended
the teachers you’ve impressed
and the classmates
you’ve offended…by simply
being alittle black boy
who could read and speak well
and vividly express himself,
find clean shirts amongst the dirty ones
and dress himself
long enough
to cover up his little pain
and then bring me a little more
of whatever it is that you have
bundled up in your little hand,
In the Taxi to the MRI
Rachel Hadas
I try to concentrate on the weather. Everything
deliquesces into simile.
Sleet ticks onto the windshield like a clock.
Truth blinks on/off like a stuck traffic signal.
It is better to live in the light but the light is flickering.
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak-
Poetic paradox understood too late
or maybe just in time. What time is it?
A small white poodle in a quilted coat
lifts a leg to pee against a hydrant
on Sixtieth Street, and we are nearly there,
early, of course. And since (she said) my heart
has been wrung out, no, broken, this is the …
this has to be … The sentence will not end.
The mind pulls, stretches, struggles, and returns
not to any absolute beginning
but a blank wall. Is there a door in it?
A future? How to get there? And once there
how to escape? When flickering stops and steady
light shines, that may be the worst of all.
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak,
but mercifully the blinking begins again.
About the poet:
Rachel Hadas is board of governors professor of English, Newark campus, Rutgers University. The
Rx
 Veneta Masson
Politicians…were quick to rise to the defenseÂ
of a particularly vulnerable population. As a group,Â
dual-eligibles [Medicare-Medicaid] have incomes belowÂ
the poverty rate…and take an average of 15 medications a day.
Â
Washington Post
January 14, 2006
Â
This is how it works:Â
as wealth trickles downÂ
to the poor and oldÂ
it turns into pills.
Â
So M and S, their slender portfoliosÂ
long since depleted, can still
compete for bragging rights.
I take twenty a day, says M.
Ha! counters S, I take so many
they had to put in a port.
Â
G presides over the corporate enterprise,
his specialty, mergers and acquisitions.
With combined assets (his own and his wife’s)
filling two cupboards, he allocates resources,Â
tracks inventory, restocksÂ
from Canada and Wal-Mart.
Â
K can still indulge herself.
I’ll start with one of the pale pink ones,
she tells the striped tabby,Â
but I might decide I need two or three.
I’ll wait a while and see how I feel.
Maybe the purple would do me more good.
Â
Honor is served.
Wealth is transferred.
The old have their pills.
And their health?Â
That’s another story.
Â
About the poet:
Â
Veneta Masson is a nurse
Antibodies
Shanna Germain
At twenty, I started working the HIV
ward, midnight to morning. Left my husband
sleeping, mouth-open to the air, toÂ
drive through the dark body of the city.Â
Every shift, the warning about infections.
Me sliding on booties, disposableÂ
gown and gloves. Even through the mask,
you could smell decay, the way virusesÂ
swept through bodies. I did what was needed:Â
held hands through double-gloves, took bloodÂ
or confessions when I could, told off-white liesÂ
to thin cracked lips that knew the truth.
Once, a year or so into it, I stuckÂ
myself, pointed red end of an IV needleÂ
left in a lab coat pocket. So small a thingÂ
it almost didn’t hurt going in, onlyÂ
leaving, small pop and smear of two bloods mingled.Â
I put the wound to my mouth and sucked beforeÂ
I thought. Fear rising, rinsed my tongue with soap,
spit someone’s dark blood into the white scrub sink,
then gave my own blood to one of the other nursesÂ
to be tested. At dawn, I roused my husband awakeÂ
with my newly tainted tongue, let him slide bareÂ
into me, as though nothing was between us.
I tell this all like
Physician’s Exasperation
Howard F. Stein
We know so much about you–
Your blood, your urine, your internal organs.
We can see everything.
There is precious little that
Is not wrong with you medically.
Still, you do not listen to us.
You miss appointments;
You don’t go to referrals we’ve made.
Do you defy us or merely not understand
How dire your condition is?
You could die at any time,
We have told you more than once.
Still, you muddle along as if all we know
Does not matter. Tell me, what
Is missing from our story?
Have we failed to impress upon you
The urgency of the hour? Speak to me.
I will listen now.
About the poet:
Howard Stein PhD, a psychoanalytic and medical anthropologist, is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, where he has taught for thirty years. A poet as well as a researcher and scholar, he has published five books of poetry, including Theme and Variations, which will be published this October by Finishing Line Press (www.finishinglinepress.com). In 2006 he was nominated for Oklahoma Poet Laureate.
About the poem:
“The search for control–real,