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Cure
Veneta Masson
In Latin it means care,
conjures priests and temples
the laying on of hands
sacred pilgrimage
sacrifice
the sickbed
invalid and
solemn attendants.
How far we have come.
Today’s English
has neatly expunged
these purely human elements.
Cure is impersonal, consequential
unequivocal, sometimes violent–
the annihilation
of the thing that ails.
This nurse
approaching the patient
has discarded temple garb
for practical scrubs.
His gloved hands
unsheathe the magic bullet,
shoot it through the central line
where it locks onto the target cells.
For the not-yet-cured,
there is still sacred pilgrimage–
that dogged slog
to the high tech shrine,
the health food store,
the finish line of the annual race
where, etched on each undaunted face,
is a gritty tale of survival.
About the poet:
Veneta Masson RN is a nurse and poet living in Washington, DC. She has written three books of essays and poems, drawing on her experiences over twenty years as a family nurse practitioner and director of an inner-city clinic. Information about her poetry collection Clinician’s Guide to the Soul is available at sagefemmepress.com.
About the poem:
“What started me on the path toward this poem was my ambivalence about symbolic ribbons of all colors, the
Listening
Elizabeth Szewczyk
I couldn’t erase their words,
catch the breath atoms, stuff
them between lips,
couldn’t raise survival rates,
lottery odds dependent on cells suctioned
at the precise moment.
Your chest thumping, frantic,
valves siphoning warmth, drawing
cold through vessels, to your feet
crisping leaves beneath us while
you spoke her life.
Replaying slowly, baby girl, toothless
smile, creative toddler scissoring
Barbie hair (and styling hers to match).
Then, like a runner, sprinting
to that day the tumor revealed
itself, unveiled her future and yours.
You visioned her mane, now extinct,
loose, straight, gracing the crook
of her back, gracing the oval of her
face, strands like gold
embroidery framing emerald eyes.
We’d be mother-friends,
shooting Prom pictures,
scarlet satin shushing past her hips,
his fingers yanking the collar of his tux.
They’d glisten, her upswept hair
perfumed hibiscus.
About the poet:
Elizabeth Szewczyk’s poems have appeared in Westward Quarterly, Crazylit, Chanterelle’s Notebook, Shapes andFreshwater, which she co-edits. She is also the author of the memoir My Bags Were Always Packed: A Mother’s Journey Through Her Son’s Cancer Treatment and Remission (Infinity Publishing, 2006)
The Women of Victoria Ward
Muriel Murch
I remember
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 yarn
Tumbled upwards from the empty cup
against that scarlet scar
beneath the bodice
of her bright summer dress.
I remember
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 that
foolish pink protuberance
her own John Thomas.
Her slow, shy smile
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,
she said.
He hated trees dying in our living room.
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.
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,
always a forecast of more
She says, I think now
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 out
losing weight as “The Incredible
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 Sontag
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.
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.
He had at last found something that had no metaphor:
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 me
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 father
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 defense
of a particularly vulnerable population. As a group,
dual-eligibles [Medicare-Medicaid] have incomes below
the poverty rate…and take an average of 15 medications a day.
Washington Post
January 14, 2006
This is how it works:
as wealth trickles down
to the poor and old
it turns into pills.
So M and S, their slender portfolios
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.
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,
tracks inventory, restocks
from Canada and Wal-Mart.
K can still indulge herself.
I’ll start with one of the pale pink ones,
she tells the striped tabby,
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.
Honor is served.
Wealth is transferred.
The old have their pills.
And their health?
That’s another story.
About the poet:
Veneta Masson is a nurse