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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
My Friend Sandy Has Ovarian Cancer Too
She’d moved west to Seattle; by phone
we compare treatments, numbers,
chances.
Hanging on, she says: we are survivors.
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.