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Closing up the Cabin

Robin Schoenthaler February 10, 2012 1 Comment

Robin Schoenthaler

I met Burt the Monday before Labor Day. As I walked into the room, he stood up–a sturdy, fifty-three-year-old guy with a direct, sky-blue gaze. Although he was a little etched around the eyes, he mostly looked the picture of health.

Two years before, he’d had a cancer. It was treated and thought to be gone. But for several weeks now, he’d been having excruciating low-back pain; he rated it a ten out of ten. The day before, a new CT scan had revealed that his original tumor had spread to his liver and bones. A spiderweb of tumor damage in his spine was the cause of

Are You a Doctor?

Margaret Kim Peterson August 5, 2011 No Comments

Margaret Kim Peterson

“Are you a doctor?”

I am sitting by my husband’s hospital bed in the surgical admission ward, where he is being prepped for surgery to close a severe pressure ulcer on his left ischium, the knob on the pelvis where your weight rests when you sit.

Dwight was eighteen when an illness damaged his spinal cord, rendering him a paraplegic. He is 49 now, and developing the kinds of problems that go along with being a middle-aged cripple (his self-descriptor of choice).

One such problem is pressure ulcers. We thought we’d learned how to manage these, but met our match in this one, which has refused

Giving Care

Ronna L. Edelstein June 26, 2009 No Comments

Ronna L. Edelstein

When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.

I spent the next half-century living

Tree Years

Addeane Caelleigh December 26, 2008 No Comments

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

Ripped From the Headlights

Maureen Picard Robins December 19, 2008 No Comments

Maureen Picard Robins

“Get a notebook,” he said.

Dr. Altman and I stood face to face on the pediatric surgical floor of Columbia-Presbyterian Babies & Children’s Hospital. It was the first week in December. A metal crib–it seemed more like a cage or prison–separated us. In this center space lay my yellow heart: my eight-week-old daughter, wounded by surgery, dulled by morphine, our whispers flying over her.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours since Dr. Altman opened the baby’s abdomen and held her tiny intestines in his hands, untwisting them like a fisherman untangling his line; nearly one day since he’d performed a Kasai procedure, fashioning a conduit so that bile could tremble down to her small intestine; one thousand four hundred and forty minutes

In the Taxi to the MRI

Rachel Hadas October 24, 2008 No Comments

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

Echocardiography

Rachel Hadas July 18, 2008 No Comments

Rachel Hadas

One: secretarial computer screen:
appointments, cancellations. Two: machine

we’re here for, registering your heart’s each pump
with grainy images that throb and jump

in sync with the obscure interior.
Three: anticlimactic VCR

screen, a tiny, garish old cartoon
squawking and jerking in the darkened room.

Past these respective renderings of vision
we move next door. Here the examination

is palpable, is stethoscope to chest:
breath in, out, raise your arms, stand, squat, and rest.

I’m sitting, staring vaguely at the sky–
from the ninth floor, a pale blue vacancy.

What is a window but another frame
or screen through which to ponder–is it time

or space that peels this dull facade to show
the poverty of what we really know

despite the

Aunt Helen Sees a Ghost

Laurie Douglas April 23, 2008 No Comments

Five months ago my husband and I moved from Manhattan to Queens to take care of his 84-year-old aunt, who has Alzheimer’s. Although she can’t cook, shop, or manage her money anymore, Helen is remarkably functional in her own home. She’s lived here almost forty years, more than half of them alone, as a widow.

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