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Averages
Kenneth P. Gurney
The helmet-less skateboarder
with his head split open
never checked his rearview
for the one-in-a-million chance
gaining on him and all of hisÂ
experience through
six-hundred-thousand plus
ollies, railslides, and mctwists
makes no real difference
as the EMT scribbles the words
organ donorÂ
on some official looking form
before the ambulance zooms off
toward the hospital.
About the poet:Â
Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM. His poetry appears mostly on the web, as he prefers to spend SASE and reading-fee monies on pumpkin spice cookies for his Dianne. His latest book is An Accident Practiced: Poems by Kenneth P. Gurney. To learn more about Kenneth, visit www.kpgurney.me/Poet/Welcome.html
About the poem:
“I witnessed the ambulance arrive and went over to find out what was going on. The kid with his head split open lay on the sidewalk. He was a skateboarder of skill, according to his frightened friends. I made up the part about the EMT scribbling ‘organ donor,’ but I had heard ER nurses comment that bicyclists and skateboarders who do not wear helmets are ‘future organ donors.’ The poem’s title reflects that the law of averages catch up to even the best
He Plummeted
Nina Bennett
He plummeted
into madness
as if into a run
for the Olympic bobsled team,
careened, thrashed,
crashed
into the rails
of his hospital bed,
whispered
about hidden
microphones, a plot
between his doctor and Visa
to keep the cure
for AIDS secret.
Eyes darted
from window
todoor
as he yanked
out
his IV line,
bellowed
about truth serum,
he won’t tell,
we can’t make him
tell.
He had been a nurse, took care
of his lover and too many
friends. Nobody left now
to care for him. He died
alone
in a nursing home
while his support group met
without him, while they
held hands to end the meeting
with a prayer.
About the poet:
Nina Bennett, author of Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief, is a psychologist who has worked in the HIV field since the beginning of the epidemic. She has a subspecialty in bereavement issues, with a focus on perinatal loss. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Alehouse, Oranges & Sardines, Philadelphia Stories, The Broadkill Review, Grief Digest Magazine and the anthology Mourning Sickness.
About the poem:
“For many years I facilitated a support
A Medical School Professor Calls It A Day
Neal Whitman
First Grade, long ago:
The bell was rung.
School’s out.
The Last Day of School!
A lie, of course.
The end of summer proved it so.
But today truly is
My Last Day of School.Â
Today I retired:
took my last breath
as a professor.
But what had I professed?
First, that a preceptor without example is a vain thing.Â
True teachers dare to be exemplars.
Second, that inspiration is an active process.
A principle of respiratory physiology,
but also a precept of pedagogy.
Finally, a variation of the Shaker saying–
Every breath a prayer.
Every breath a lesson.
About the poet:
Neal Whitman is a University of Utah School of Medicine Professor Emeritus now living in Pacific Grove, California, where he tootles around the Monterey Peninsula in a white hatchback with the auto plate “PG POET” set in a frame inscribed “Poetic License.” Since retiring from academic medicine in 2008, he has published over 300 Western-form and haiku poems. Neal and his wife, Elaine, collaborate on another Japanese art form, haiga, which combines imagery with haiku; Elaine’s photography and Neal’s haiku have been published in several journals and are featured in Pacific Grove’s weekly newspaper Cedar Street Times to
The Ancients Had It Right
Stanley H. Schuman
In Aramaic scripture*, and Aboriginal Dreamtime.
How else could animal life begin
Except by Divine Breath, oxygen-enriched?
How ingenious! Only two atoms: O2,
Ideal for hemoglobin, mitochondria,Â
Neurotransmitters, ideal for fight or flight, for vocalizing,Â
For clever humans to shape tools, split atoms,Â
Compose opera, sow seeds, harvest grain.
Consider my distress, in my just-opened pediatric office.Â
Stumped by Angela, a three-year-old
So panicked by my white coat, no way to examine her.
Screaming, clutching Mother, she knew and I knewÂ
This wasn’t university-hospital, with back-up nurses.
Instead, it was one-on-one,Â
Advantage Angela.
Desperate, I felt for a stray balloon in myÂ
Pants pocket (from my own child’s birthday).
Putting it to my lips, I strained to inflate the stubborn thing.
Instantly, Angela’s tear-reddened eyes opened wide.
The more I flushed and puffed, clown-like,Â
The more she giggled, finally bursting into laughter,Â
Sans fear, forgetting pain.
My breath, a yellow balloon, a child’s laughter…
Three gifts from the gods!
*Douglas-Klotz, N.:Â Prayers of the Cosmos, 1990 Harper, San Francisco, CA.
About the poem:Â
“This poem captures two memories for me: my anxious first day in solo pediatric practice in suburban St. Louis, 1954, and my enchantment with the
Morphine, Pearl Harbor
Ann Neuser Lederer
They do not scream. They keep their hands steady as they shoot the shots.
They run from one to the next, on their rounds without walls.
The troops of well trained girls patrol the troops, their wards.
And they make them to inhale their brew
of Friar’s Balsam, tincture of tree resin:
Pines and cooling mountain breezes in the steaming, smoke filled chaos.
Pliable amber beads, shrines for prehistoric bees,
crumbs for tuneful fiddles lull like opium beds
on the dark, explosive rocks
And though they run around, the nurses are careful.
They inscribe the letter M on the foreheads of those they have dosed,
They make their gentle mark on foreheads doomed or wounded,
under dust and thunder.
About the poet:
Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio and has also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky. Her poems and creative nonfiction can be found in journals such as Brevity, Diagram and Hospital Drive, in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing (2009) and The Country Doctor Revisited (2010) and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated and Weaning the Babies. She has earned degrees in anthropology and in nursing, is employed as an RN and is certified in oncology nursing
Semi-Private Room
Jan Jahner
Sometimes nectar appears
when stories intersect:
I walk into the roomÂ
rearrange the bed-table
and push the pole with its bulging bladder sidewaysÂ
for a closer look.Â
Her thinness triples the size of the bed
but her father, with his anxious chatter
feels strangely like my own
and her resolve, that tense control
has a familiar edge.
It feels like all the calories she’s ever countedÂ
and all the sweet things resisted for the last eleven yearsÂ
have aligned as a taut shield
protecting that juicy place that hasn’t ripened,
urged too early to carry her family through chaos:Â
after all, her mother was dying of cancer
after all, mine couldn’t manage mental illness
after all, aren’t fathers helpless in these things?
The electrolyte imbalance that nearly took her lifeÂ
and the nurturance imbalance that emptied
her adolescent pockets of all the in-free tickets,
lie tangled with the feeding tube she never wantedÂ
while she talks and I listen, my beeper ignored.
Our connection becomes a spoon
with its delicate curve
Starting the good-byes, I hand her my card
she reads through the menu
departing, I feel the full moon
rising in my chest.
About the poet:
Navigating
Life of the Party
Veneta Masson
By ones and twos
we drift up to the bedroom–
the women of the family–
leaving the men to mutter
and churn downstairs.
This is women’s work,
choosing a burial outfit.
We have a list from the mortuary:
bring underthings
no shoes
Soberly we peer into the closet
slide open drawers
touch, handle, inhale.
Ah, I was with her when she bought this…
Remember the time?
What about a hat?
Oh yes, she loved hats!
No, not that! someone laughs.
Someone laughed!
We begin to try on, critique.
Soon the room is festooned
with strewn fashion.
We turn giddy, intimate
acquisitive–
a raucous sisterhood.
Next day some are subdued.
We got carried away…
Maybe it wasn’t right…
And yet at the time–
in the moment–
and hadn’t she been
the life of the party?
About the poet:
Veneta Masson is a nurse and poet living in Washington, DC.
About the poem:
“Who hasn’t had the shocking experience of laughing in the face of tragedy? At first it feels wrong wrong wrong. But what a gift it can be–giving us the strength to gather ourselves and carry on. I’ll never forget that evening in my sister’s bedroom, the fragile hilarity
Going Blind
Kirstyn Smith
I still dream Crayola:Scarlet, cherry, candy apple;Â
Zeus’ breath, Antiguan shallows, Atlantic turmoil, August twilight;Â
Green sings lime, martini olive, cypress, spring meadow, life.Â
When I woke up this morning, I wanted to turn over.
Of course, you feel the same way.
I had a dream about cleaning my fingernails. I had this beautiful, shiny silver file and I
could see the brown of the dirt. Peach, compost, and ivory. Each nail suffered caked mud
beneath the many split layers, great time and precision to extract the telling debris.Â
I worked to carve out the dirt, to rid my hands of the everyday work mess that drives my
soul and gossips my menial livelihood.
And I wish I could say that there was a dramatic culmination to myÂ
metaphorical dream. But I can’t. There wasn’t.Â
I opened my eyes to see the plain old brown-grey darkÂ
that has been my life since the birth of my last child, the blindness that has coated my
every movement, every thought, every intentionÂ
since before I could awaken to color and breathe.
Most days, I do not roll over. I don’t attempt to recapture the lost.
I trust my doctors to
Life, Preciously Poured
Kate Benham
You pour a cup of pecans
Like a kid catching raindrops
In a bucket.
Careful not to spill,
Your fingers playing tremolo on aÂ
Violin-string cup measure.
Your bed-tucked
Mouth, warm, with
Tongue searching the lips
For forgotten first lines of bedtime stories
Like misplaced glasses, resting on your head.
I read to you, now,
In hospital beds.
Forehead wrinkles stackedÂ
In three creases–
Your crossword face,
Mouth-chewed pencil between your lips,
Scooping for synonymsÂ
As you now scoop sugar.
Patient tablespoons of vanilla
Heaped with the effort
Of standing up for fifteen minutes
Love spelled in spilled flour
By hairless eyelid blinks.
This mother’s day coffee cake
Streuseled with memories of able-bodied bike rides
Suspended in white hospital gauze.
It tastes like antiseptic and cinnamon.Â
This baking is labor
For the hands of a heart surgeon
Too tremored to hold a scalpel,
Hold a measuring cup,
Hold on.
His lifeÂ
Preciously poured,
Savored in my mouth
Even as it slides downÂ
My throat–
Swallowed.
About the poet:
Kate Benham graduated from Stanford in 2009 with a degree in feminist studies. She is currently working for a women’s health nonprofit in India and applying to medical school. She