Zelda Alpern

Ichneuman

My dad sits in his electric wheelchair. No amigo, one swollen hand on slacked lap, one fisted at motorized controls. Wheel buzz wheel hum instead of footsteps scoring my stealthy childhood. Gone Canadian crutched clip clop, their sight and sound my earliest e pitome of ugly. He's on the walk closer to the curb than the house which he en ters from the side on a ramp that hides ornate iron-worked stairs. If he enters or exits the front door

it's on a stretcher under amb ulance lights or once in a van-sized hearse if a hearse is any aut omobile that trans ports dead hu mans. Pyra cantha smothers the rails he used to hold to transition from scoot er to car seat pre-wheel chair. When mom is real ly ready to leave he'll buzz himself and his wheelchair or I'll push the knob by his bloated hand, propel him down the lawnside cut-out, up the mini van's ramp where I'll belt him in, where he‘ll ask for

mint gum from the pouch that hangs from the back of his chair. He waits. Mom's indoors, not ready. I go outside to smoke. Look at this Zelda will ya? I can't figure it out. What? On that stump. The maple by the rails by the peace sign I scratched while the cement set (dating the rails to junior high). What? I ask again. Is it one or two? Huh? I blow smoke away from him squat close to old dead wood, see it. So skinny most sightlines won't catch it. Long as my hand's width, terr

ible thin, tail-stinger-thing-a ma-jig, a loop from it self inserted in to bark. It outlasts us, outlasts my mom's late ness, my fa ther and his wheelchair belted and buckled in to the mi ni-van insect still piercing the the old ma ple stump. I forgot to tell you about the neighbor Don Patch who came outside to smoke—emph ysema and all— who we waved over to see this strange small sight. He brought his camera, sent pics to the in sect zoo. Don drove us, my mom and me, to the airport for

my father's funeral. Don's dead now, too. Mom wasn't up for the ten hour drive to my fa ther's hometown, in western Pennsyl vania. Al most thirty I had no license. Don told us he was a minister's son. The pictures Don took were blurred, disappointing as a photograph of a ghost though this insect was real. The ep iglottis the last muscle to fail my fa ther. He choked on hot Chinese food. Turned out what he ate was going straight to his lungs for a year. He had chronic MS. Emph ysema

took Don. I met an ento mologist in Philly at a then-boyfriend's art open ing who wore bright green. He was tall with dark hair and a beard, resembled Sebast tian, a child hood neighbor who met me at dawn to hunt bugs when we were seven. I longed for snails' spiraled shells, we found slime gray slugs, stored them in jars un der the porch like science projects and death. The entomol ogist named what my father and I had seen: ichneumon fly, well wasp really. The long loop neither tail nor sting er but o

viposit or that bore three in ches through rott en larvae full wood to lay its eggs. Its an tennae dis cern the species lodged inside pri or to drill ing. Their larvae hatch from eggs with in the host larvae, eat their way out, disa ble their hosts' immune systems to prevent att

ack. Some ichn eumans lay eggs in the larvae of other ichneumans, the en tomolo gist says. The salon chair dryer above his dry head yawns no breath. Unusual venue for an art o pening. Wasps not flies, he reminds me. I wish I had the pictures Don took, that

the blurred i mages crisped to catch the looped cell ophane-thin lined origin of my father's nervous sys tem's end. At his death did MS take wing—what is its post-host phase besides this?

Zelda Alpern's poetry and fiction have appeared in Literary Imagination, The Warwick Review, Chain and Fiction. Currently studying to be a clinical social worker, she has also made her living as a teacher, community organizer and grant-writer. Her poem mourns the loss of a loved one. "Ichneuman" takes as its subject her father, Erwin Alexander Alpern, who was diagnosed with chronic multiple sclerosis before she was born. He passed away due to complications of this disease ten years ago this coming April. His most common refrain was, "Don't try, just do it" which became increasingly difficult for him to live up to as his disease progressed, but which nonetheless has ingrained some measure of self-discipline in his daughter.

---

Ken Arnold

Conversations with Dr. Bill
In memory of William Newton, September 25, 2011

1.

The summer we met we were dying
you of ALS and I of prostate cancer.
We bonded over plans to kill ourselves.
You were a talker after decades listening
to patients on your psychiatric couch.
You loved to pose a question and then rummage
through the endless permutations
toward no answer.
These were koans such as:
how will I be present to my daughters
when I’m dead or we to each other?
Can this conversation last?

Conversation’s what you cherished.
You asked to be remembered in a garden
by your friends who’d stroll and talk
about whatever they desired
not only you
(whom all of us desire).

I’ll be gone.
The living need each other more than me.
But then you smiled indulgently
I’ll be there somehow
perhaps by giving everyone permission
to imagine that I am.

The news that cancer wouldn’t kill me yet
changed our conversation.
I saw the knowledge in your eyes
that what had bound us now was loosed
perhaps a sadness at the loss of a companion
in the journey through the liminal world
between this life and that uncertain other.
We speculated on the spaciousness
of disembodied minds
the possibility of liberation
we could not describe but only long for.

How could we
trapped in bodies
know?

We were seekers after death
and yet reluctant to abandon everyone we loved
to satisfy our yearning for the satisfaction
of our restlessness.

You’ve gone and now you know
and I am jealous of your knowing.

2.

The I Ching was your guide.
You inscribed a copy for me
to my friend and fellow seeker
a coin toss to help with the future
Love Bill
and taught me how to use it.

Today I throw the coins for you.

Heaven over Water means Contention:
the ideograph combines
a face with an open mouth
the act of speaking bluntly
and self as one who asks for justice.
Seek the middle ground.
Contention should not last.
True or false will be distinguished.
Thus the Yao text for the initial six
the Greater Yin
which leads to

Heaven over Lake
Fulfillment
A person walking in his shoes
which for the Chinese means
one advancing with firm steps
toward his fulfillment
who walks with an open heart.

3.

We met for lunch one day a week
in your apartment just to talk
until fatigue diminished you.
You recounted stories that gave meaning
to your life and mine.

Arriving in Hawai’i to run a clinic
never having run a clinic
overwhelmed at first you stood at the western edge
of the island and ahead was only empty water
like the future given to you
empty water.
Later when you met a young psychiatrist
who’d worked for you back then she said
you taught me so much.
How you wondered when you knew so little?
What you knew was what I needed.

Surrounded by your friends and daughters
even former lovers
you refused to give up conversation
and contention
arguing the points
even when your voice was dying
and your lungs were gasping for relief.
You threw parties randomly.
We gathered one night to watch slides of China
taken when you were thirty.
Such a handsome man a woman said.
You smiled
still handsome in your breathing apparatus.

Days before you died
I saw you in the lobby of our building
coming back from Happy Hour
at Joe Bar down on Twenty-Third
your shoulders slumped
your head too heavy to be raised
the tube delivering oxygen to your face
a reminder of how little it would take
to take you

and you were gone.

4.

Supreme Good Fortune
reads the Gua:
Review the past
Summarize the journey
Everything is fulfilled.

I’m still alive and still have cancer.
You are cured of ALS
which never had a chance against you.

I recall a rare clear day with you
gazing through your windows
at Mounts St. Helen, Hood, and Adams
the Columbia divide
a landscape you had come from California
to inhabit and as you looked with softened eyes
your voice broke.
You turned to me and asked

Would you change anything in your life if you could?
We bounced the question back and forth
in a game of philosophical table tennis
until you grew tired and spoke
in a voice already difficult to understand:
I’d change nothing
not even this
and turned your chair away
and said

         I need to rest now.

5.

A sleepless night my mind awake to every nuance
of the dark
            after sitting for an hour with Bill.
I don’t feel safe he said.
Who are those people?
                    Your friends who love you.
Take me somewhere else.

I prayed with him to ease his passage
one hand on his forehead the other
holding his inert left hand while friends
massaged his legs and shoulders.
Look he has goosebumps someone said.
His eyes met mine when I was finished
and his death was in them.
I kissed his forehead.

                      To love is to choose.
The world chooses us
all things conspiring to enfold our being
and takes us to its heart in death
the consummation of desire.
Love is incomprehensible
our understanding obscured
by the body’s narcissism.
                              Bill in perfect
stasis
          body wasted
                    voice inaudible
                              breath plastic
                                        hands rigid
succumbs to mind
holding discourse with reality beyond our hearing.
We are the talk he leaves behind.

Ken Arnold is a former book publisher and retired deacon in the Episcopal Church. He is an award-winning playwright and poet, whose poems have appeared over the years in The American Poetry Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and other little magazines. Bill Newton was a neighbor/friend diagnosed with ALS in summer 2009, at the same time Ken learned he had metastatic prostate cancer. They met for lunch weekly until Bill’s death in September 2011. Ken wrote this elegy and read it for Bill’s memorial service, over which he had asked Ken to preside. Ken still has advanced prostate cancer controlled by hormone injections. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

---

Jamie Sue Austin

today
you went outside
and played
just like other little boys

what modest milestones
could bring such joy

I am paralyzed by the dirty dishes

in the same way
that some personalities
freeze in hostage situations
the clutter constitutes
too much visual input
and I have lost my
data processing capabilities
as if the house
has folded on top of me
black and thick
a mat of confusion
with dusting
repairing
cleaning
cooking
holding
healing
teaching
loving
and merry making
my primary duties

going unperformed
as I sit banded and blinded
I can no longer see
a section of my brain relays
a repeated message
—External connections
to critical data inputs
severed—Back up systems
fail restore—reboot
system and clear cache
If there was more cash
and time for processing
I could overcome
my own objections
—at this point
I have blue screened.

take 2 green pills and 1 blue till tame

Some people are
made of pens
and paper,
desks and screens,
everyday objects
and mundane concerns.

A select few are
feral things that
can’t find comfort
in a easy chair,
who chase the
wind, and howl at the moon.

If you knew me better
than you think you do
you’d know which kind
of person I am
and why I smashed
the vase and
ripped down
the curtains.

Jamie Sue Austin struggled with epileptic seizures, depression, and anxiety throughout her childhood and young adult life. Now in her thirties, she is the mother of a child with moderate to mild autism. Caring for a disabled child amplifies her own health issues, but it has not impeded her love of learning or dissuaded her from her long term goals. Currently, she is a freelance writer and student. Barring any difficulties with her health she plans to have her doctorate completed by 2016. For her son, she hopes that he will find happiness on the path he chooses. Her chief fear is that society will fail to recognize her son's talents and abilities.

---

Sandra Becker

Flash in the Night

You are singing me Al Jolson songs
and letting me win at cards,
you are taking me to Nunley's Park
where I try to grasp the rings.

You are offering your sorrow into my open arms
as mother, sister, brother argue
over checkers - dots of white and black.

How do I, at four years old,
know you are dying? You are dying.

On the dresser, the jewelry you sell;
sky blue opals, blood red gems
against black velvet.

There's a murmur in my own heart now;
doors which don't open or shut well.

Under Cover

I remember the fine knit suits
and silk blouses you wore,
beiges and blacks,
perfumed with Coty's Lamont
showing just a hint of cleavage,
and your wide-brimmed hats,
slightly tilted, just the right angle.

And I can't forget how you dressed-
swiftly, secretly, folded over yourself
in your walk-in closet
as if surrounded by spies,
the frightened grip
of your hand on mine,
the way you closed
the curtains.

Later, your hair fell out
in my hands
and you hid your head,
soft as a baby's,
under a wig by day,
a turban while you slept,
hid the bandages
dressed over your heart
that could not stop its bleeding.

The day you lay dying,
I finally stopped the nurse
from breaking the sweet spell of sleep
each time she shouted your name.
Even dying, you withdrew
silently, in a coma.

Now, I draw the curtains open,
squint from the light.

Invasive Species

The breast lump you hid two years, the breast
removed too late, the cancer spread
                                                                              Taxifolia, killer algae, bred in an aquarium
                                                                              released by accident from a museum
You broke down, cried the first time to me,
one poor judgment, dreaded deed
                                                                              all that's needed to bad-seed the pristine sea.
                                                                              The algae ruins the fertile bed that
Look at me, look at me
you pointed there and I realized then
                                                                              feeds the fish, spawns the germ that clones
                                                                              itself, that crowds out surrounding sea grass
you meant you as an object of desire,
your definition of yourself was over;
                                                                              meadow from Monaco to L.A. Nothing
                                                                              could halt the algae, not cobalt, not chlorine
no, nothing could be done, not chemo,
radiation or surgery
                                                                              All that's left is to tug, to pull, to tear out
                                                                              impossibly stubborn weeds;
hair falling out into bare
and trembling hands.

Sandra's mother suffered a difficult life: mental illness (depression and anxiety) and physical illness (breast cancer). She was a very private person hiding her breast lump until it had metastasized. These poems are an attempt to articulate her inner world as Sandra saw it and how it effected her. It's an attempt to articulate what her mother never could.

Sandra's book At the Well of Flowers was published by Virtual Artists' Collective in Winter of 2011. Her chapbook titled Foreign Bodies was published Spring 2004 by Carolina Wren Press. Poems published in Bucks County Writer, Comstock Review, Concrete Wolf, Flesh & Bone, Mad Poets Review, Main Street Rag, Raving Dove, Poetic Matrix Press/PM Books; Rexdale Publishing, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Out of Line, Wild River Review. Runner-up in the 2004 Robert Fraser Poetry Contest. First runner-up in 2009 of the Bucks County Poet Laureate. Recipient of a writing award from the National League of American Pen Women/Simi Valley Branch, placing first in their 2000 Poetry Contest for poem "Honor the Stones." She feels immensely blessed to be part of a community of amazing and gifted poets of Bucks and Montgomery County.

---

Ariel Bugosh Boswell

Burdens

We carry our crosses, imposed,
not punishment but unhappy chance-
"you, Cyrene, carry this."
Some spontaneous mutation,
one slip of a chromosome changes
ereyvhtnig
But some are written in our bones;
the suffering we face spelled in amino acids,
a twisted key locked somewhere in a spiral.

And were these genes once of value?
Did they pose some evolutionary advantage,
that they remain within us?
Or is it just that our lives have extended
and our expectations exceeded
what these codes were meant to convey?

We are made in our fathers' images
and formed with our mothers' dust.
We must trace their trails
on hands and knees; recapitulation
is destiny, and the only question is
whose death shall we die?

Contemplation of reproduction
is steeped with fear - what roulette
are we playing? Will our child get
a mixed-up mechanism or
the paralysis of depression, the curse
of an ancient anxiety, or
some new struggle? And even if-
the chips fall so and they seem perfect -
there is no guarantor when things fall apart.
Certainly adoption is no less risky,
playing the odds with someone else's cards
(although altruism has its advantages).

There is no way to beat the system, no way-
just forward, and hope, and pray.

After Cancer

Disasters change the landscape: mudslides obscure roads,
tornadoes rip away towns, floods cover farms-
this too was a disaster.

Reborn through a baptism of IV antineoplastics
we explore this new geography
our paths transformed and rotated by pain;
hills changed to mountains, plateaus to valleys,
new chasms threaten where plains once rolled to the horizon.
These fields are bitter and salted with my fear;
what crops would grow here?

The first hurdle passed, the track streams into
an eternity of caregiving - and in what context?
IVF, ALL, melanoma, not to mention
the odds of further failure based on collective bad luck.
The future frays before my eyes;
the fig tree does not blossom and the fields are bare.
I touch the fragments of the pitcher by the well,
my dreams poured out like water.

Yet. This dust will rise again.
Roads and towns rebuild, floods fade,
the wilderness returns and waits -
listen, the cry of the wolf
beneath the northern lights.

Do not be afraid that this journey does not follow the map;
the alternate route is more scenic by far.

Tomatoes

She wanted a tomato sandwich
not just bread and tomato, but buttered,
and no crusts, and just so; the tomato, peeled, sliced
the proper way, everything in its place,
and buttermilk on the side–

That day I came in she wanted to go
and buy some fresh tomatoes at the farmer’s market. So,
I loaded Mary and her walker up into my jeep
and we took off – an unlikely duo-
23 and 92.
I rolled down the windows,
hoping she wouldn’t overheat.

Once there she rolled her walker up and then -
was too tired, so I picked out the tomatoes
while she sat, chatted up the other customers
then I got her back in the jeep
and we drove to the nursing home
and I rolled her in on her walker,
short, spare, emaciated, pale,
she crawled back into bed while I
made her a sandwich...

That may have been her last tomato stand.
It wasn’t so long afterwards that she
was lying in bed, delirious, demanding pill after pill
for pain, and a shake,
the mean nurse said “she can’t eat, she’ll aspirate.”
I wanted to scream “you’re letting her die!”

but really it was just me
not letting go.

Ariel Bugosh Boswell is a 2007 graduate of Davidson College and 2012 graduate of a nursing program. Her husband, a medical student, was diagnosed with cancer in December 2011 and has undergone 4 rounds of chemotherapy. His cancer is currently in remission. Ariel regularly participates in narrative medicine workshops held through the humanities department at the Mayo Clinic. She draws on her personal and professional experiences in home healthcare, low-cost immigrant clinics, and long-term care in her writing.

---

Jada Broussard

You'll Find Me There

If ever you feel or sense me near
Please don't doubt that it could be
Don't think that it's impossible
For that rainbow to be me

I will be the whisper of the wind
I promise to never leave
You can be sure my presence emanates
All you have to do is believe

That song that resonates in your mind
Will be the one I sing for you
Oh darling, please rely on faith
As I help you in what you must do

As you hold our children's hands
And share this grief you bear
Just gaze into their eyes my dear
I swear you'll find me there

Jada Broussard is a 34 year old mother of two. She is living with inoperable lung cancer, and has accepted her fate in this life. She is a dedicated mother who spends her time making memories for her children. Her only wish is to create a wonderful legacy for her children so that she can be with them always.

---

Michael Estabrook

Help Me Nurse

You can’t really sleep in the hospital. First of all,
the lights are always on. Secondly,
it’s a very busy place like the New York subway
with plenty of interesting activities going on
around you all the time: the night shift
nurses and physicians’ assistants and cleaning crew
carrying on about this and that, patients
wandering up and down the hallways
plopping along in their walkers peering in
to check on how you’re doing, the friendly nurses
who pop in every couple hours to take a tube of blood,
your blood pressure and temperature, a guy
a couple doors down coughing up one (or perhaps both)
of his smoked-out lungs, in his spare time working
on the details of his legal case against Philip Morris
for making him smoke all those cigarettes
all those years, the bastards! And then
there’s the old guy with the scruffy beard
right next door to my room who keeps yelling out,
“Help me nurse, nurse help me, help me nurse!”
over and over and over again.
When I expressed my concern about what
this poor soul could possibly be suffering
my nurse said, pursing her pale lips mournfully,
“He’s confused, poor fellow.”
And all I could think was, he could be me.

Michael Estabrook has struggled with chronic back pain his whole life, from his first spinal fusion surgery at age 17 through to his second at age 55. He has tried everything including Acupuncture, Anti-depressants, Chiropractic, Epidural Steroid Injections, Trigger Point Steroid Injections, SI Injections, Radiofrequency, Narcotic Pain Medications, Physical Therapy, Spinal Fusion Operations, T’ai Chi / Qigong / Kung Fu, and Svaroopa Yoga. Finally, finding no relief anywhere, he has become convinced that this is all “in his mind” and is actively studying a course of treatment for Tension Myositis Syndrome.

---

Christopher Farrell

Born with a Broken Heart

             I. Cogito
Life - in all its glory –
lungs that won’t breathe
a heart that won’t beat,
not ready to be
born, and it’s only
because he’s thinking
that he may still be at all.

             II. Family Movie
An infant struggles to find his feet.
Mother – ghost-like omnipresence –
just arms that reach from beyond
the screen to guide teetering child.
Hands lose grip.
Boy straightens,
blue eyes wide,
blue lips pursed,
One precarious foot before the other.

             III. Show and Tell
Because the kids will point
and ask about them anyway,
he shows the wires to the class –
because technology billows, conspicuous,
beneath his shirt, running
information from his heart
to his hip-mounted monitor.
Because there’s a reason for the scar
the boys see in the locker room.

             IV. Tetralogy
Twenty-four years removed,
he learns what went wrong,
exactly –
             Overriding aorta
             Heart wall hole
             Narrow valve
             Thickened right ventricle
The implications of the doctor’s words,
“What we didn’t know at the time…”
and there’s something unnatural
in the fact that he’ll be split open
a second time, twice in his first
quarter century.

Arrhythmia

There is nothing less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding it we are forced to obey it. - Rousseau

At night when it’s only him
and his heart he hears
it thumping against his ribcage -
he listens close but can’t count
the beats and can’t tell
if it’s the odd timing
of a broken drum
or if he’s just too tired
from a day of ignoring
it - like a little brother
he can’t avoid taking with him
everywhere.

Christopher Farrell is a twenty-seven-year-old poet from Connecticut. He was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a rare heart defect for which he has undergone two open-heart surgeries, one as an infant and one when he was twenty-five. He recently earned his M.F.A. degree from Western Connecticut State University and works as an English professor in Westchester, NY.

---

Erin Farias

Wrapped

A package arrived in the mail today
dated December 31, 2011—
back when I was still pregnant
with colorful pictures of smiling infants
taped across the box' surface.
With my breath held and my chest pressing against my skeleton,
I grab a knife and cut along the box's ridges—
breaking in half the largest picture
of a perfectly formed wide eyed infant.
with tears streaming down my face,
I remove a small onesie and lay it gently across the surface
of my empty womb
and watch the ink smear across the card that reads, "To Mama and Baby,"
and grasp a white blanket of feather softness
that should have held my child, come September.
Instead I wrap it around my shivering body and rock myself
in still emptyness
as I carry the weight
of losing the only thing that I have ever wanted.

Erin Farias is 28 years old and lives in Grand Rapids, MI. She graduated in 2006 from Calvin College with majors in English in Spanish. She and her husband were thrilled to be expecting their first child. Unfortunately that pregnancy ended in miscarriage. The poem "Wrapped" describes this loss.

---

Michelle Lizet Flores

Movement

It started with the ovaries.
        The doctor plucked one out
        before you ever bedded anyone.
Next came the spine.
        The scar nearly fades into your dusting of freckles, though in certain
        lights its raised skin glints: spilled oil.
The thyroid was the first to be deadly.
        I was eight years old trying to see a world
        without your singing.
Your left breast followed.
        I was in calculus learning tangents when I noticed, on the glossy
        surface of my desk, how we have the same mouth.
Now it’s your brain.
        That fucking golf ball—

Nostalgia

I wish I could keep you forever.
I have your blood,
        your skin,
        your all too serious face.
Soon it will be me, alone
in a forest of phosphorescent trees.
I’ll search for you in the stars, in the earth.
I’d change myself into a hawk for you. I’d stay that way
forever— the first of my kind,
then darkness would not be strange in my eyes.

Saying Goodbye

Once you’ve carved shit out
of your mother, once she bites
your finger after you try to brush
her teeth, life becomes the pebble
you never learned to skip.

You hear her call your father an asshole
as he tries to lift her up and bathe her.

When you kiss her cheek, her mouth
bobs open, mistaking your
lips for food.

You watch as she becomes a bag
of piss and bitterness.

She might not know where she is,
but she’ll always remember
purple is your favorite color.

People keep telling me how alike we look.

I can still smell your soap,
detergent, and musky perfume.

Maybe if I rub my head on your pillow,
I’ll find one of your hairs.

Maybe if I close my eyes,
God will speak to me.

If had known you’d be gone in five years...
Maybe that’s why we fought so much.

You wanted to keep me then,
as I want to keep you now.

I keep biting my lips—perhaps their shape will change.

I find myself in your closet
pulling on your dresses.

My last real conversation with Mami.

        She told me she knew. She could feel her mind slipping, her voice cracking as the hymns in her synapses crumbled to dust. Mami looked at me as though she was trying to burn me into her pupils.

        She said, “Your father’s young.”

        She said, “He’s a good man, better than me.”

        She said, “I didn’t want him to defile my bed, but he is young. I’ve tried to love him one

        more time, but I can’t, Gorda. I just can’t. So if he meets someone, let him fall in
        love. He’s a good man with needs.”

        She said through her tears, her spit.

        I was still a virgin then, didn’t understand what she meant. I knew she was talking about sex, but I didn’t know what it meant to feel someone inside of myself, skin against skin.

        If she were alive right now, she’d be ashamed of me—a girl who fucks a much older man to drive the pain away. The things I let him do to me… but what does it matter now?

        I am a cane toad waiting in the night.

In the spring of 2009, Michelle Lizet Flores’ mother, Lizet P. Flores, was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. Lizet passed away two years later to the day after fending off the disease with an insurmountable amount of strength. Due to circumstances beyond her control, Michelle spent the last two years of her mother’s life in New York City where she was fortunate enough to receive her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She spent every school break and many weekends visiting her family. She now lives in Memphis, TN as a 2011 Teach For America corps member where she teaches 7th grade Reading and Language Arts at the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering.

---

Roger Floyd

Then She Went Away

I came home one evening and she told me she saw the doctor today,
And the doctor said an operation would be necessary.

I said, “Okay. I guess the doctor knows best. Maybe this will be the last.”
But it wasn’t.
She said she didn’t want the operation, but she agreed the doctor knew best
And maybe this will be the last.
But it wasn’t, there were more.

She had many more operations,
Maybe as many as twenty-five or thirty or even more,
But I was never able to keep track of all of them.
She didn’t want any of them
And I didn’t want any of them
But she went through every one of them
And I sat through every one of them–
Five, ten, twelve, fourteen hours.
When the operation was over
The doctor came out and told me the operation was a success,
That it did what it was supposed to do.
Then I went away.

I went to see her in the recovery room
Where she was coming out of the anesthetic,
But she was still groggy and she barely recognized me.
I told her that I loved her
And she said she loved me, then I went away.

But the operation didn’t solve the problem.
The operation didn’t do what it was supposed to do
And we found out there would be many more operations.
She didn’t want any of them, and I didn’t want any of them,
But we went through them anyway and somehow survived.

She had other hospitalizations too—there were many of those,
Perhaps as many as one hundred,
And I sat through everyone of them.
They came and went—they seemed to last an eternity—
Some only one day, some a week, some a month and some even more.
Most days I came to see her and I told her that I loved her
And she said she loved me and I went away.

She took the drugs too, there were many, many drugs.
She took drugs for pain, there was a lot of that.
She took drugs for nausea and vomiting, there was a lot of that.
She took antibiotics for infections, there were a lot of those,
But there was never any drug for multiple sclerosis,
And there was there never any drug for hepatitis C.

There was home health care too.
There was bed rest and being bedridden for several months at a time.
I saw her every morning when I got up,
And I saw her every evening when I came home,
And I told her that I loved her and she said she loved me,
Then I went away.

I came home one evening and she told me she had diarrhea all day,
            But I went back to work the next day.
I came home one evening and she told me she had nausea and vomiting all day,
            But I went back to work the next day.
I came home one evening and she told me she had pain in her eye,
            But I went back to work the next day.
I came home one evening and she told me she had more pain in her back and leg,
            But I went back to work the next day.
I came home one evening and she told me she had a lot of pain in her abdomen,
            But I went back to work the next day.
No matter what happened, I kept going to work
And I kept coming home, day after day,
Hoping each day would be different, different from the rest,
Different enough to make coming home worthwhile.
But I went back to work the next day.

For several years near the end we were lucky, very lucky.
She hadn’t had an operation in a long time,
And she hadn’t been hospitalized in a long time.
Home health care delivered the TPN every week,
And home health care delivered the pain medication every week,
And most every day I told her that I loved her
And she said she loved me.

For several years we waited and wondered, what will be next?
Will she have another operation?
Will I have to see her in the hospital again,
Or was the last operation to be the final one?
I told myself, “Maybe she won’t have any more operations.”
Maybe we won’t have to go through the pain and drugs and infections again.
Maybe we can just ride it out.

Looking back on it now, was I just being too flighty and fanciful?
Was I looking too far ahead under the rosy sky that wasn’t really there?
Was I just being too selfish,
Projecting my dreams and hopes and aspirations on reality
Instead of on her where they belong?
Had she not had enough?

Those were the questions I asked myself day after day.
Those were the perpetual questions that tore at my soul
And gnawed at my conscience.
Those were the questions that disparaged science and knowledge
And defamed the idea that man is master of his identity.
Those were the questions that threw cold water on the flame of love
And mutual respect and understanding between a man and a woman
To tell them, “No. You shall not be.”
Those were the questions that violated me
And sent me drifting into despair.

Then she went away.

Sometimes I wish I knew what was coming so I could prepare, but I can’t.
Sometimes I wish I could tell the future, but no one can tell the future.
Sometimes, I think, not even God can tell the future.

Roger Floyd is a retired Ph.D. virologist who switched to writing science-fiction novels several years ago. He’s currently working on a sci-fi trilogy, and writes short stories and poetry in his limited spare time. His wife, Marilyn, was found to have degenerative spinal disc disease early in their marriage, and later was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and hepatitis C. After thirty-six years of marriage, uncounted operations, severe pain, and the futile ministrations of numerous physicians, she passed away in 2003.

---

Jessica Goody

Panic Attack in Neo-Natal ICU

This is where it begins:
Can you imagine lying
In a glass coffin, like Snow White
Strung with tubes and
Wires like tin-can telephones,
Strings of Chinese firecrackers,
Tucked into conduits and tethers?

I am only earthbound
By the sterile rubber, the plastic, the glass
Hoses linking me to my cell like a pet, leashed and caged.
Some tubes fat as tunnels, others noodle-thin.
Intravenus, oxygen, shunt, catheter,
lung-pumper, pacemaker.

Can you imagine
An extended sense of awareness,
The way a cat’s whiskers tingle
And his fur rises
When it’s about to rain?
Prone, supine, straining.
It must be how Helen Keller felt,
Black blindness, all-encompassing.

The beeping
Of monitors, thermometers, air-tubes;
The hiss of artificial breath, raspy and stale.
Every bodily function
Measured and rated.
Until you become your own timer, a human clock,
regulated and regular, nervous and precise.

Intensive Care

“An ironic name for things that can’t be made up for.”

I am the drumbeat of thought.
Names anchor
Us to ideas, concepts,
Images of oneself.
Picasso had fourteen names.

I didn’t have
A Namakaran Sanskar.
I was in intensive care,
In a glass greenhouse
My skin stretched whitely over bird bones,
Punctured with tubes and needles.

Struggling to suckle
The liquid compassion,
Vitamin love,
My mother’s pregnant body did not possess.

Wracked as she was
With evil fluid,
Soured her veins
And choked me.

I was cut
From my moist cave,
my fleshy grotto
With cold moonlit razors.
Crying bitter blood redly,
Like being thrown
From a body-warm bed
On a tender winter morning.

For three months I lay,
panting
in my transparent tomb,
my quartz sarcophagi.

Waiting to be lifted from this halted life,
still as Aurora draped in silk linens,
cold as a sleeping Snow White in her golden casket.
Three months
In suspended animation.

I could not tell time
But I heard
The clocks ticking,
Tapping transparent fingers
In impatience,
Waiting for the
Cosmic pause button to be released
And the glowing green arrow pressed PLAY.

Ninety days,
The average time span of an addict’s
Stay in rehab.
Ironic.
I was forced to do my mother’s time
In addition to my incarceration
In my mother’s
Smoky sports-bar
Of a womb.

Possessing my own sense of time,
But lacking the ability to relay it,
I do not know
Whether the birthday
I have celebrated
For twenty-two years
Is accurate,

Whether my astrological self
Of the third month
Rather than the last
Is the real me.

Jessica Goody’s work has appeared in New York newspapers, anthologies such as Timepieces, Seasons of Change, Moonlight Café’s Poetry By Moonlight, and The Sun Magazine. She was a Featured Poetess of SpiralMuse.com. Her work has appeared on the blogs Cyclamens and Swords, Getting Along with Grief, Addictive Fiction, Riot Grrl Online, and Poetica Magazine. She has written a volume of poetry and a mystery novella and is currently seeking their publication.

---

Jim Gustafson

Scrabble Word Eyes

I have just come from my mother
She lives at a place called Manor Care
(Intended, I suppose, to evoke some sense of nobility, as in "To the Manor Born")
Where she is near, though not quite here

Her darkness blinds her light
There is no knowing her
Perhaps there is peace
She certainly has a bright smile
Always with that Scrabble word
Search in her eyes

We visit at odd times
To keep her caregivers
On their toes
As they fill-in
Doing what people like us
Once did for their own

Just yesterday, or was it
The day before, we took her
To the dentist
Where she put up a hell of a fight
The hygienist, fearful of bites,
Finally declined to clean
Mother's aging teeth

We think it was reclining
In the dentist's chair
That threw her off her game
Made her snarl and snap
Like an old farm dog
For when she sat back-up
She greeted us all
As one would greet best friends

Returning from a guided tour
Of a distant land

She looked as a child looks
Asleep after a tantrum
When whatever was
Is no longer,

It will take more than awhile
For death to arrive at her gate
When we look carefully
We can see it coming
From behind her smile

To take away
All that has not left
Almost already

Brain Storm

           for Dan

It is hard to look at your head
Not that the scrubbed masked cutters did poorly
They cleaned up well and left you to live on

It is hard because the scars confront
They whisper of where you have been
Where you are and where we all will go

You walk some days better than others
But your mind's pace never stumbles
Sure footed in matters of the Spirit

You are humble, grateful, gracious
Sometimes, I think, to a fault
"I don't want this to define me," you almost shout

About this, there can be no argument
No debate, discussion or even conversation
You will have your way

That is good enough for us all

Jim Gustafson graduated from Florida Southern College with honors in philosophy and received his Master from Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern University, in his hometown of Evanston, Illinois. "Scrabble Word Eyes" relates an incident with his mother and Alzheimer's. "Brainstorm" is about his friend Dan who has valiantly fought brain cancer through two surgeries. Jim lives in Fort Myers, Florida where he reads, writes, works with an improve group and pulls weeds. His poems have most recently appeared in Symmetry Pebbles, and Hektoen International Journal, and 10X10

---

Constance Hanstedt

Radiation

I lie with arms raised above my head,
shoulders and neck pressed on a cast
of my upper body, similar to those
hanging on dress racks by the wall,
a crisp spring line in the latest shade
of purple.

I stare at a giant steel replica
of the goose-necked lamp
on my childhood desk and think
nothing this heavy should loom
over a person. Then it rumbles
toward my skin, plum-colored
and puckered.

I float on a distant memory.
Sand absorbs my shadow like oil
as I look for a place to spread
a blanket, an armful of books
with titles I don't remember,
a clear plastic tote
with possessions I can't recall.
But in the hazy stillness
the sea shimmers, a lacy white,
dappled lavender.
Sunlight bathes my bare calves,
glistening like tender buds
of willow. I stop and breathe
the cool smell of water.

I pray this is how it will be.
The vast room fades while
beauty gleams: his reverent touch,
her tranquil voice,
the generous red beam of life.

Constance wrote "Radiation" following her treatment last year for breast cancer. She studies with the poet Ellen Bass. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Calyx, Porter Gulch Review, Red Wheelbarrow and other journals.

---

Catherine Harnett

Steep

They are right in front of me, these concrete steps and I want
to say why they are hard to climb. I search for the word.
My mouth goes blank. It’s not even on the tip of my tongue.
I know it is one syllable, commonly used. I am distressed.

I was the girl in love with words, reading Webster in the
bathroom we all shared. Thin pages full of definitions,
small drawings next to certain words. Wimple was a nun
with something on her head; bacterium, cells with cilia
some long, some minute.

I am afraid of losing names of fruit, that juicy orange
on the plate, tart lemon, cantaloupe. My dog’s name, and
the color of her snout. Which day tomorrow is, and the
day after that. Tell me it’s alright, it’s just one word,

one word now and then that slips my mind. I still have
a gift for calling up the names of actresses, finding some
four letter thing for fifty-two across. Tell me there are
times when adjectives evade. And other times when they rise

to the surface, unsolicited, words like cerulean, deciduous,
aphotic. They want my mouth around them, they long
for me to use them to describe such simple things.
Sky, tree, night.

Catherine Harnett is a poet and short story writer from Fairfax, Virginia. She was diagnosed with MS in 2006. Catherine retired from the Federal Government, having worked for 31 years in a variety of positions. In hindsight, there were symptoms for years—tripping over rugs, no tolerance for heat, a dislike of the summer sun, vague aches, vertigo—which never were recognized as aspects of the disease. She is doing fine, disliking the daily shots she must take, but grateful for the way they halt the progress of MS.

---

Chad Haskins

Preyed

A frozen sunrise
illuminates the mass
in my x-rayed right lung,
held up by a steady hand
with an educated voice
of concern,
bringing me to my knees,
thinking—two boys need
a dad and a future, not a
scared shitless stranger,
coughing up regret,
fearing the unknown,
unable to look in their
precious eyes:
reminding him of what
might be lost,
yet knowing they still
need him now;
he must fight...and
fight against himself,
to the death.

Chad Haskins lives in Newnan, Georgia with his wife and two sons. Chad recently underwent several tests to determine if the pneumonia in his right lung was caused by cancer or a tumor. The poem “Preyed” reflects some of Chad’s feelings during that time. Chad's writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in Rose and Thorn Journal, Blue Collar Review, Untitled Country Review, The 5-2, Pure Slush, Powder Burn Flash, Yellow Mama, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Dark River Magazine, Flashes in the Dark, and drown in my own fears.

---

Alan Dennis Harris

The Rose and I

As I step into
my breakfast nook
the rose and I
exchange a look
It sits alone
inside its vase
and watches as I
take my place
It watches as I
face the sun
my mourning
place-setting for one
It watches as I
close my eyes
to see the sights
of days gone-by
It watches as I
strain to hear
the sounds of life
no longer near
At last I ask
Please tell me why
we both remain
but no reply
as it wonders if
inside this home
the two of us
shall die alone

As a young man, Alan D. Harris worked for several home care agencies, including the VNA of Chicago. Hospice clients whose memories were being affected by early onset dementia struck a chord with him. Today, he puts his gerontology education and past experiences to work helping older authors to write and often times re-write their own life-stories.

---

Paul Hostovsky

Disbelief

Take this beautiful
woman in my arms—
I don't believe my eyes,
and I don't believe my arms.
I don't believe my ears
when she says she loves me, too.
Time passes like you wouldn't
believe. I think I'm happy.
Then I think I'm sad.
Then happy again. Then not.
I don't believe my thoughts,
nor anything the past has taught—
not one belief I ever learned before
from anything. I lay aside
all thoughts of what I am
and what love is. It's not
that I believe in nothing,
if that's what you're thinking.
I believe in disbelief. I believe
you can walk through this world
and not believe it for a minute.
You can get to the end of it
and not believe that either.
You can sit in a small room
all alone with your body,
put on the humble johnny
that closes in the back,
and when the doctor comes in
with his numbers,
which are your numbers,
you can not believe them either.
You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ears, pool
on the floor where his eyes
and your eyes have fallen.

Oath

Being sick I swear I will
seek out other sick people,
the fellowship of the sick
that heals me of the eyes
of the healthy, the terrible
hope of loved ones, the lies
that melt on the tongues
whose excellent appetites
and singing glottises
and vibrating tongue rings
do not belong to me.
I will make of my leper's bell
a symphony of bells;
I will take my bacterium
to the bacterial dance floor,
and do the bug, the viral,
the metastasis, the funky
microbial. I will shake my legs
like a tick who has found
the deer-throat of love.
Being sick I will be sick
unapologetically, and with
abandon, and with someone
else who is also sick with
all his heart and all his soul.

Long Battle with Cancer

What he needed was a little more patriotism,
a little more fight, a little more fuckin' a
for kicking cancer's butt. But the thing was,
he was a conscript. His heart wasn't in it,
whereas these volunteers, these mercenaries—
these doctors and nurses and radiologists
and radiation oncologists who made their living
killing cancer—their hearts were in it, they were
into the good fight. But his heart, for its part,
was set on desertion. And so he kept on looking
out the window of the transport vehicle
at the trees swishing by, en route to the appointed
appointments. He kept on looking for a way
out. A way to escape into the trees, disappear
into the woods, surface in some neutral country
where life was going on as usual and nobody
cared or talked about or paid any attention at all
to this tiresome old war that was still going on
inside him. But there was no neutral country,
no such place; no village, house, room, corner
of the world where the long battle he could bet
his life his obit would reference, wasn't going on.

Letting Go

This is a required poem.
You do not have to read it now.
You can wait until
you're dying if you want.
But you have to let go of everything.
You have to let go of everything.
You can start by letting go
of this poem. Just let it
go. Let it fall to the desk, skim
the edge, spill to the floor. Let it
lie on the floor face-down
so you can't read it.
How to read this poem when it's
lying on the floor face-down
like a body?
That is the seeming difficulty
of this poem. On the one side
words are everything. On the other
nothing. Just the poem saying
to let it go on without you, saying
on the other side there's nothing
as difficult as it seems.

Paul Hostovsky was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins follicular lymphoma four years ago, a fact which has never appeared in his brief bio, until now. He is the author of three books of poetry, Bending the Notes, Dear Truth, and A Little in Love a Lot. To read more of his work, visit his website: www.paulhostovsky.com

---

Karen Jakubowski

Migraine

Cerebral bloat

                    smashing waves

against cranial plates.                   Smarting

                migraine.

The sunrise torments.
                Its brilliant threads of searing

        light

                        sharpened quills, fresh plucked feathers
                pierce my eyes. Apparitions

                                    float

        eclipsing         visualizations             impede.

I left my body, watched it
speed along the highway.
Pain so intense I had to leave.
I feared for the living
corpse without a mind.
Were the mechanics of driving
rote enough to keep me sane?
Perception swam to the left of my head,
conjoined with celestial illuminations.

                Is this what it's like to be dead?

Cassandra’s Last Suffering

It sang with the moon, welcomed me to womanhood.
Twice it bore fruit, bright healthy and ripe.
Naturally fading, its prime withered. Gifting me
with the sweat of a sultry dance on icy nights.
I’d hoped to part gracefully, but it had its own agenda.

I think it knows my intention. The shadow looms,
dangles like a lifeless leaf waiting for the final wind to set it free.
It was ogled, prodded, picked at and medically raped.
Yet railed no protest. I thought it resigned.

Today it rallied. Pressed me to honor it.
Picketed with red smeared signs – I won’t be forgotten!
We commune for one last lunar celebration
before the knife separates us.

I’m Not Ready to Be an Angel Yet

I’m not ready to be an angel yet
With flowing white organza drape
to cover skin’s imperfections.
Five tiny scratch-like blemishes,
remnants of a gallbladder.
Burst appendix, minutes from demise,
belly full of toxic peritoneal fluid.
A deep scar wide enough to hide my thumb,
my souvenir of death’s call.

I’m not ready to be an angel yet
with platinum halo floating o’er my head
though I’ve worked hard to earn it.
Multiple lesions scar my brain.
Radioactive dye courses through my veins as
glowing white images shine on the MRI screen.
Annual reminders of no cure yet discovered.
Fourteen pills daily consumed,
one injection weekly stabbed into my thigh
to rebuff my disease.

I’m not ready to be an angel yet
with gossamer wings to fly.
I have faced many challenges.
Three bedridden days with a paralyzed leg,
feet cramping nightly, toes curling under,
the gripping vice under the tips of my ribs,
a frozen bladder ready to burst.
Three hundred plus syringes
reside in red bio hazard containers,
trophies of my fight.

I’m not ready be an angel yet
with a golden heart radiating pure love.
Three contiguous years providing
nourishment to my suckling babies.
Four metal marker clips live in my “busy breasts”
Reminders of the ten inch needles
surgically plunged into once milk-filled orbs
searching for suspicious tissue.

I’m not ready be an angel yet
with glowing aura and spirit chaste.
I’ve loved many; birthed and raised two children,
comforted my man within the warmth of my body.
The call came today… results of my pap:
“abnormal, high grade lesion, pre-cancerous tissue.”
Testing to follow, my recesses to be intimately
explored at the hands of a stranger,
more tissue to be torn from my cervix,
biopsied, microscopically analyzed.
Don’t let it be the big “C”.

I will continue my crusade at life.
I’m not ready to be an angel yet!

Karen Jakubowski’s poems have appeared in various online publications. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the fall of 2006, although she can trace back her symptoms to 1988. She came close to losing her life when her appendix ruptured in 1985. She was recently diagnosed with pre-cancer of the cervix and underwent a total hysterectomy in April 2012. At the time of her hysterectomy, the surgeon also discovered a dermoid cyst on one of her ovaries. Her biopsy came back positive for cancer, but fortunately the surgeon removed all of the cancerous tissue. She is currently healing from surgery.

---

Amy Murre Klemm

Farewell, Arvin

June 25, 1999

Your breaths were slow and with each one I felt
you leaving
leaving the earth this realm your
spirit filtering out into the air of the room I
didn’t know if she’d chosen that soft golden light
on purpose to hide your wasted body your
ravished face but when I bent clinging to the metal
bed rail near you, I found you were neither
wasted nor ravished but smooth skin and
smiling vision and peace
Is that why I have this difficult
grieving that is not grief
but alternate selfishness, fear, speculation, and joy
for where you must be now?
It frightens me how my memory fails me
how its pictures of you are already sometimes faded
and without the detail of your eyes or
clothes or exact words which were so few,
a man who could whistle louder than the birds, than
a train, a man of strong back,
shoulder, arm, pride
the magnificent handshake – how many
babies you have held on your knee and smiled
your saintlike smile

Amy Murre Klemm lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work has been published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Cliffs: Soundings, Melusine, and elsewhere. Throughout her teen years, her family lived with and cared for her grandfather, who passed away after many years of living with dementia. “Farewell Arvin” was written in memory of him.

---

Anna Kurtz

Manic - Depression
  (Rapid Cycling)

Scattering In the confines of my head Gyres of masochistic thoughts Pick me pick me pick me Only so I can Stumble And forget

In the confines of my bed Bound by the intangible Driving me to desperation Pick me up Linger Remember What it was

To be
Okay

Anna Kurtz is a New Jersey native who has lived with Bipolar Type II disorder for her 23 years of life. Diagnosed while receiving treatment for a drug addiction that developed as a result of self-medicating the disorder, she uses writing, talk-therapy and meditation in lieu of pharmaceutical treatment.

---

Lyn Lifshin

The Yahrtzeit Light

Dusty, with some skeletons of
a flying thing that died
in it, as if the flame
already had been pulling
on things restless and alive.
My mother bought it, an
extra one, the year after
my grandmother died,
when my mother’s hair was
still dark and curly. It
waited fifteen years in the
middle of scales, shoe
polish and liquids to make
what is glowing hot, spit
eerie light and the flicker
of death into shadows. I
couldn’t throw it out:
more Jewish than anything
I owned and wondered if my
mother would have other
people leaving too fast to
say goodbye to, rub her
hands in front of this
candle, rub what was still
warm numb as a heart rubbed
raw. This morning, my mother
at ninety pounds, was afraid to
stay alone in the mall,
her face gray as the stone
squares she had trouble,
even holding my arm, getting
across. I take her bag, as
if alone she might collapse
and nobody would know who
she was to claim her. My
uncle’s voice on tape
reminds it’s the anniversary
of my mother’s mother’s death
so tonight I give the candle
to her, go down to the room
where no candle could catch.
In the glitz of fire, my
mother’s cheeks are caverns
no light fills

Taking my Mother to the Bathroom

I lead her, a
child waking up
from a nightmare,
dazed by light.
She lags, hurries
then, half cranky,
half grateful.
She wants the
door shut, then
says open it,
wants my hands
the right way,
wash in between
my fingers. She
says the wash
cloth is too
wet, too cold,
too soapy. The
towels are too
heavy. You don’t
she spits, cover
your mouth. Go
home, you should
not be here to
see me like this

Curling on the Bottom of my Mother's Bed

as she would
on mine in
different houses,
bring me iced tea
at midnight or
cold chicken we’d
devour with our
fingers after
a date. I don’t
think she minded
having to take
my arm in dark
restaurants
or crossing the
street, a good
reason to touch
me as she does
more freely now
as light in June
starts shriveling.
We whisper to
each other these
past 41 days we
haven’t been apart,
like new lovers
who feel what
they have so rare
they can’t bear
to sleep apart

These three poems all involve my mother's illness. When I edited Tangled Vines, my anthology of mother and daughter poems, to my amazement, I had many poems about my father, or the lack of a father, but nothing about my relationship with my mother. From that time this ambivalent, mysterious relationship has been a central theme, almost an obsession in my work. Another poem written around the same time, Mint Leaves at Yaddo, about the changing relationship between a mother and a daughter, as a strong parent becomes older, became my subject for an award winning memoir that appeared in Writer's Digest. Autumn Wind, another memoir of the last days of my mother's life, was published as a chapbook by Portrait Press and The Daughter I Don't Have was published by Plan B press

---

Jennifer Londry

Pickle’s Birthday

Alzheimer’s is a devilish twin. It’s a black & white photograph of mother and child, a forgotten season, a chapel without denomination.

Inside the House of Providence is a hot flash. Summer lives here. Thin cannot survive without the luxury of swelter. I punch the key-pad to release the door to the fifth floor. The greeters are sprawled in chairs: alert sits next to fidgety, lethargic dozes next to grumpy. They are unaware of what day it is, or what calendar month. May is a slick umbrella. July is a floral skirt or a pair of men’s linen trousers. September wears a shawl, carries an apple basket. November is a wool cap and mukluks.

          I know each of their names, but it’s less important that they know mine. They refer to me as: “Nurse. You-who. Hey lady, Girl, or worse.”

          Several sets of hands lunge at the mysterious box I have wedged under my arm. I deke left, cake tilts. Cake rights itself.

          I see Pickle coming down the hall toward me. She wears a jean jumper, red beret, hair up in a tipsy bun. She lisps walks in one red shoe, one black. “Happy Birthday, Pickle!” She smiles like a child expecting of a kiss from a favourite aunt. I hug her. Hold her for a long time. “You look beautiful.” I say, and then I pirouette around her. Her strong cheekbones snug to her face, lineless, full of smiles.

          In her room plush toys sleep at the head of her bed like tiny coats meshed together in a kindergarten cloakroom. Everything in the room looks like it’s been caught in a butterfly net: purple wooden flowers, long red willow-finger drapes, glowy stars, and a pair of snowmen socks poking out of a drawer. I set the cake on the bed and put the yellow mums on the night table. I hand Pickle an envelope. She holds it. Smells it, takes a bite, and then drops it to the floor. I pick it up, and sit down beside her. I open the envelope and show her the picture on the cover. “That’s you and me mum,” I say, even though it’s not. I pin the card to Love’s bulletin board. Turning I see Pickle has the mums atilt in her hand, teaspoons of dirt spill to the floor. I take the plant and set it on the sill, push the drapes open, lift the window a crack. The sun leaps in the window like an anxious child rushes to a plate of warm cookies. A string of red hearts flutter in the breeze. I place a piece of cherry liquorice in Pickle’s hand. She bites she chews, she’s in love with liquorice. She snuggles beside me on the bed, body so close I can feel the frame of her entire being. In her left hand Pickle holds her constant companion, Annie-rag-doll, by the short reds.

          Outside Pickle’s bedroom door there is a riotous parade. There is fast, slow, wobbly, erect, fat, tall, lopsided, skinny and barefoot. It is lunch time, and everyone is being herded into the dining hall. Some have mouths too tired to eat and they trail off in the opposite direction; they’re a chain of little string-mittens.

          In the dining room, I pick out Pickle’s favourite things from the cafeteria counter. Pickle eats with her fingers, prongs and spoons too slippery to feed hunger. A hot dog bun gets tossed. Mustard Pollack down the front of her top, a nip of relish on her cheek: a leprechaun’s freckle. French fry gets dipped into a glass of milk.

          The room is quiet chaos.

          I wade past the milk puddles and the wreckage of cutlery on the floor to where I’ve stashed the cake and candles. Returning to the table I distribute the party hats. George, one of Pickle’s table-mates, is disgruntled because his plate is empty. He spiders his fingers across the table and snatches two hunks of Pickle’s diced wiener.

“One for Pickle,” I say, replacing her beret with a party hat. “One for Mary, George, and Hilda…”

          I secure the elastic under their chins.

          “Me don’t want stupid hat!” Mary says.

          “Get it OFF! Get it OFF!” George bellows.

          Hilda tilts her head back, throws her hands in the air, and roars, “It’s My Birthday!”

          “I didn’t order this,” Mary snaps. She cannot eat. She has a throat full of thorns. Mary removes the hat and spits in it.

          “It’s a party,” I tell her. “And people at parties wear hats, and EAT CAKE.”

          “Shove your hat up your sunshine,” Mary says.

          George drives over the discarded paper hats with his wheelchair.

          I light the candles. I blow them out. No one gets hurt.

          We sing. “Happy Bird-day to you, Happy Bird-day to you, Happy Bird-day Dear Pickle, Happy Bird-day to You.”

          Echoes of sweet fill the room like raindrops on the tongue. I smile and set the cake down in front of Pickle. She claps, lifts a mound of chocolate and presses it to her lips. I slice and distribute the rest to the non-diabetics at the table. George who hasn’t any teeth slurps sugary puree. Mary makes a chocolate hat.

Jennifer spent seven years alongside her mum who had Alzheimer’s disease. Alicia Londry (Pickle) passed away on Valentine's Day 2010. Jennifer's experience at Providence Manor, a long term care facility in Kingston, ON., are gently being penned in ink.

---

Deborah R. Majors

When?

Playmates:
Remember when Grandma Daisy threatened
to show the sepia photos
of you and me bathing, splashing naked
in the metal washtub?
You with your girlish flat chest, me
with no love handles?

Helpmates:
Remember when we skinny dipped
on our honeymoon, chased unsinkable
Ivory soap and dreams?
Later we posed for a photo
under the sign to Niagara Falls.

Teammates:
Remember when we bought the house
on the golf course? We celebrated
till dawn, ran naked
through the sprinklers near the 9th hole,
then made love on a pine-straw bed.
You worried about the night watchman.

Stalemates:
Remember when, the kids off to college,
our second honeymoon to The Mediterranean
where we lounged and lingered and laid
in the ocean, buoyant
in the salt which I hoped would purify
my infidelity? You forgave me, and we threw a party
to bore friends and family with our port-side slides.

Inmates:
Open your eyes; let me swim in pools of sapphire
so like the ring I gave you for our 49th anniversary.
Wrinkled shutters open and flutter
grayed, thinned lashes. Your hooded
eyes hold no sparkle.
You don’t remember when,

my name,

or even your own.

Start Off On the Right Foot *

Easier said than done when only left
will do. Left it must be to ease my now—
it’s just the way it is—right is bereft
of peace and satisfaction. Disallow
a sweating brow by using left always,
and then I’ll rest the whole distance, until
I stop once more to only self praise
when left begins the tour to meet my will
again. It’s easier said than done when
only left will do. Right is wrong, left is right
in my world of start offs where oxygen
depends on only left’s beginning plight.
Starting on the right foot ejects the calm
inside, so shun the right, wrong be welcome.

* According to www.namigc.org, it is now estimated that up to 3 percent of the U.S. population may suffer from OCD at some point in their lives (about 5 million people).

Deborah R. Majors’ grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, inspiring When?. As an associate pastor, Deborah often counsels those who suffer from Depression and OCD. From this counseling, she has gained insight along with understanding and compassion for those who suffer from these illnesses. Brave individuals who battle these illnesses everyday inspired Start Off On the Right Foot.

---

Jacqueline Michaud

False Positive

In the over-lit basement of Mercy,
a windowless room reeking of puke,
Tonya works to coax my buried veins
to flow freely anew — six vials this time —
to rule out whatever is worse

than what the doc thinks I have.
"Better safe than sorry," he'd chirped.
This time I remember to avert my eyes,
stare at the faded print hanging askew
in the hallway – washed-out bunnies

by a gray brook. "That print's crooked,"
I say, trying to sound at ease, blasé.
Tonya just grunts, jabs, misses again.
"It's been that way for years," she says.
I guess no one can fix that either.

Progressive

A gull glides through the glass
sea. I follow its wake, its slow,
steady dance out-pacing the tide.
Now a heron lumbers by, flop feet
dragging over drowning mud flats.
No breeze flutters a single thing.

That's all I can see this morning,
though moments ago, watching
a gull's figure eights out racing
the tide gave a kind of comfort.
For two beats it seemed to stop
what's been advancing forever.
I wish it could do that faster.

Jacqueline Michaud's work has appeared widely in literary journals, among them, New England Review & Breadloaf Quarterly, The Florida Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Voices from the Robert Frost Place. She also has published translations of work by Francophone writers, including Mohamed Sehaba, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, and Jean-F Briére. A member of the American Literary Translators Association, she received her BA in French Literature from Skidmore College. Her debut collection, The Waking Hours: Poems & Translations, was published in 2007, her second collection, White Clouds, appeared in 2009, and her latest poems and translations can be found in the online journals Per Contra, and The Monarch Review. Ms. Michaud was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009.

---

Lynda Monahan

Red Boots in the Snow

          Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness
                                                                         - Galway Kinnell

the stroke has muddied my sister
made her unclear

I will tell and retell her
in words and in touch
until every tiny bud
in her stricken brain unfolds
with the knowledge of her loveliness

I will sing to her
the lullaby of her lost self
I will sing soft voiced and smiling
until everything for her is possible again

I will tell and retell her
until she understands
crystal bell clear
as these northern lakes
clear to the very core of her
that she is lovely

until her bones know it
until the blood memory
of all that is my sister
comes back to her   to me
                      ………

these first days she cannot find herself
in the long unmarked hours
of her mind’s constant turning

adrift in the hospital
she fears the nurses doctors
trusts no-one

my son writes
on the chalkboard in her room
Shawn was here   you are safe
pins his picture to the wall

she touches his face in the photograph
again and again she repeats his words
these small life preservers in a floundering sea

Shawn was here   you are safe
                      ………

when will I be my self again

the question turns and turns inside the dark swirl of her thinking

time is unmade for her now   the future a mystical
landscape of distant blue shapes as indistinct as dreaming

when will I be my self again   the question turns and turns

the answer is a scatter of slow moving stars
a fleck of light that cannot be calculated

a clatter of stones against the broken window of her sky
                      ………

she has lost her words   searches for them everywhere
in books in the mouths of family and friends ahh ahh
she says when one of them escapes again ahh
I help her look   give her some of mine
she borrows them gratefully   the speech therapist loans
her his too   at least the beginnings so she can find the ends

this is a pretty bunch of fl fl he says   pointing to the picture
flowers she laughs clapping her hands   flowers
I want to give them to her in celebration   a whole armful
of flowers   masses of them   because she has finally found the word
I want to give her the word for everything   flowers and puppies
and Christmas trees and this one   I give her this one   family
                      ………

this December morning we are walking along the old Shellbrook highway
not so much a highway anymore as a trail through the trees
the traffic all keeps to the new road
everyone going somewhere in a hurry
but not us we are in no rush
there is nothing but time for my sister now
no flights to catch   no appointments of importance
her smart business suits traded in for t-shirts and comfortable pants

she walks in the snow now in her new red boots
shows me the fretwork tracks of rabbits
listen she says and we stop to hear the chatter of chickadees
the clean wind as it lifts and sighs
delighted she hugs the day   holds it out to me
the deer she knows and morning sun
and winter days and joy    my sister’s gifts

and this is what matters now
this slow walk with my sister on this soft morning
having her here beside me in her red boots
the sound of her quiet breathing   snow in the pines

Lynda Monahan is the author of two collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames and What My Body Knows, both published by Coteau Books. Her work has been published in a number of Canadian literary magazines and broadcast on CBC radio. Most recently she was writer-in-residence for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild facilitated retreat. In the fall of 2006 her younger sister suffered a stroke, an event which changed both of their lives in, at first, very frightening and difficult ways. “Red Boots in the Snow” is Lynda’s attempt to come to terms with the loss of her “old” sister and in celebration of the “new” sister she now has.

---

Cris Mulvey

Dark Mother

I am of the Earth, the deep, dark Earth;
the Earth, where all things go
to fall apart, to crumble...
rot.

I eat what needs to go. I breathe them in.
I swallow them. They disappear:
fodder for the new.
I fear nothing.

I wear blood, mud, shit and age,
tears, ugliness, decay,
without apology;
triumphantly.

My loyalty is to the unseen world.

I shake the bones of the dying and dance, cackling, hopping
from one leg to the other....full of glee, excited
by the space that all this death
is clearing.

I am the Great Decider. Eventually, everything arrives at my feet.
There is no escape. Nowhere to run.
I decide when your time has come.

I decide.

After All These Years of Illness

Sometimes I feel like a statue,
the kind they put in city squares:
tall, male, invincible, a great unfeeling slab of stone;
my gaze fixed on some far-off horizon,
the past perhaps, or maybe even the future.
Some old forgotten warrior holding onto
weapons I no longer have a use for.

Sometimes I feel blinded, struck,
thrown up against a wall too high to climb;
bound by wire that just bites deeper
with each round of struggle;
my senses blocked with dust or thorns,
closed off completely from the living earth
that somehow still continues,
shimmering, pulsing all around me.

Memories and dreams float by
like scraps of light, like leaves
deserted by the wind,
like the white and waxen petals
of magnolias brilliant
through the dark, blank page of forest.
Stories from the pages of my life,
those long gone, or those that now
may never actually be written.
Can they save me?
When they come
I follow, ‘til they
disappear.

Meanwhile, in all the nooks and crannies
of my head, my chest, nests
of twigs and moss are growing,
holding in their roundnesses
the eggs of all my gathered sorrows.
Where I stand now,
outside everything once held familiar,
my eyes cannot yet see:
Do buds hide in the cracks
of the world I once belonged to?
Do stars spring
from the ground beneath my feet?

Questions

What if
my body continues to blossom,
huge and female, and no matter what I do
I cannot get it back to girlhood?

What if
my blood returns and with it
the hormone that grows the –say it! –cancer?
What if the cancer returns?

What if my energy does not return ...
and all those days in the far off woods or high on the lofty crags,
flash of the baldy’s tail so high we cannot see him,
wild, wan call of the horny elk, pale shy bow
of the lady slipper in the grass,
what if all of that stays
just a memory
echoing down
the empty
trailways
of my
heart?

What if everything I am
and ever have been
gets unmade?

What if I must start anew?
What happens then to you
and me? To us?

What happens then?

Cris Mulvey was diagnosed with breast cancer in Sept 2006. Over the last five years she has been living with chronic fatigue and a number of auto immune illnesses brought on by the cancer treatment. Born and raised in Ireland she moved to Montana in 1998 where she still lives with her husband and two cats. Poetry, wild nature and meditation are her medicines. She has come to understand her illness as a gateway to a deeper, more creative and more authentic life and loves to share this understanding through her writing and her workshops.

---

Mark A. Murphy

Colorado Girl

     A girl is dying at my breast,
she falls into my arms with her arms and hands
and feet all lacerated,
the blood runs freely from her wounds.
She loves the bare walls of my humble room,
she wears a crown of ivy
and sings her sad songs that only I may hear.
She says she is the victim of torture,
that she has waited a lifetime
to fall into my arms with no head to live another day.
     Her breasts press through
the outline of a white blouse,
she dresses all in white,
her lips part in pain, she sings in barely a whisper.

Nora Forever

I do not write like Leonard Cohen,
but I tell you the naked woman in my room
makes the sign of the cross
kneeling before a portrait of Jesus.

I do not know the words to write
to make her flesh beautiful except to say
the crosses cut into her palms caress
my flesh felt like holy water.

I awoke saying, I love you.
I thought she would die in my arms,
a gun-shot to the heart
but the revolver belonged to a ridiculous dream.

Her face fell upon mine eyes as if from heaven.

Nausea

The rebel's silhouette is stained
with death,
everywhere she turns she is met by death,
in the hallway and dining room,
in the garden under the red berry tree
where she buries the doves fallen from the nest.

My love is in mortal danger
and I am powerless as a man of poor means
to stop the injustice,
I cannot buy time, not even in the face of death,
I cannot rescue my little bird
from those that would lay her in the ground.

The death mongers
have got her right where they want her,
without hope,
without consolation in the desert garden
where the grass never greens
where children leave their bouncing balls in the dust.

Pain Eater

What words can be said to save her as she takes
the blades to her wrists and arms as if to relive the pain?
No words can soothe the mother's loss at her infant,
        no words
can bring her back from the brink of self-annihilation,
loathing, despair. She would drink... bleach first
before hearing your protestations. Life is liveable,
say the steady ones. Life is beyond comprehension,
says the girl who puts the wine glass of bleach to her lips.

And so she soaks up pain as if pain were her only lot,
the pain of wars, civil wars, genocides, suicide,
nothing is missed by the girl whose own flesh,
her own blood would see her dead in the street,
before giving her shelter against the whore master
and the rapist. What words can be said to convince a girl
        to keep struggling?

My first full length collection, Night Watch Man & Muse is due out in early 2012 from Salmon Poetry (Eire).

---

Frances Shani Parker

Sweet Treat

A wisp of a woman, she waits
eagerly for her dinner tray.
I hide her magic ice cream cup
that makes other foods invisible.
Each mouthful of nutrition
adds time to her aging clock.
“Is this my ice cream?” she asks
before I feed her meatloaf.
She chews slowly, searches
for the missing sweetness.

Her arms bear bruises,
tender tattoos of darkness,
stained during recent falls.
In her dreamlike world,
objects sway like flowers
brushed by breathing wind.
Floors are moving walkways
that make her balance tremble.
Now, a wheelchair guides her
through the nursing home maze.

She remembers my name when
I volunteer. Many words lie buried
in a growing grave of memories.
Savoring each food, she concludes
they’re almost as good as ice cream.
When I notice she’s nearly full,
hidden ice cream appears.
The setting sun rises in her smile
brightened face. I laugh when she asks,
“Did I ever tell you I love ice cream?

Frances Shani Parker is an award-winning writer, consultant, hospice volunteer, and former school principal. Author of Becoming Dead Right: A Hospice Volunteer in Urban Nursing Homes, she has been published in several anthologies and journals. Her eldercare writing reflects her advocacy for older adults, caregivers, and improvements in nursing homes. The poem Sweet Treat describes a scenario about her hospice patient who had dementia. Visit Parker in cyberspace at Hospice and Nursing Homes Blog and her website www.francesshaniparker.com.

---

Amanda Gayle Oliver

The Stroke of Rae Rose

Rae read to the audience about ropes,
                              women in ropes.
Rae swam in a fresh water pond for the first time in Wellfleet,
                              the Pulitzer winner and poet laureate
                              we would be
                              without our ropes.
Rae got her photo taken in a garden
                              of roses,
Red like blood is the fountain of too many words her typewriter brain
                              rat-a-tat-tat out.
Rae is light. Today she is Alice,
                              falling down a hole
                              landing in colors,
                              eat me's,
                              and meeting a queen
                              who will have off with her head.
Rae sleeps as doctors remove cells and feminist angels
                              brush their wings like fans,
                              waiting for Rae to wake-up
                              and write again —
Read, swim, float in roses, light-up
                              and bleed only
                              from her pen.

Amanda Gayle Oliver is a Southern Belle by birth and a New Englander by heart. First published at sixteen in The Birmingham News, Oliver was most recently published in the Boston Literary Magazine, Lamplighter Review, and for the Canadian Alzheimer's Society. Her second play, "Elevator Music" will be produced at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in March 2012. She met Rae Rose at Marge Piercy's poetry intensive workshop in Summer 2010. The two connected over shared struggles in life, and their love of words and of living lives of joy. Last spring, Rae Rose, who was in her mid-twenties, suffered a stroke and had to have brain surgery. Being on the opposite coast, Amanda could not be there to hold Rae's hand. However, she wrote this poem while she prayed and waited for her friend to come out of surgery. Rae is now recovering and writing again, having relearned to walk, and continues to inspire so many of her fellow poets and friends. The writer hopes she is honored by this poem.

---

Nancy Phear

It Was Already Dark

Two days before the country went to war,
years before she did,
she made us promise.
We were kids in the living room,
watching television,
listening as the president plotted
to invade Iraq.

Elliott stretched his long frame
on the plaid couch,
I lay on the floor.
Snow fell outside the window
but we couldn’t see it,
It was already dark.

My mom came into the room,
she’d been on the phone.
“Promise me you
won’t ever
commit suicide.”
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes
We could hear them
but we couldn’t see them,
It was already dark.

She made us promise.
And then told us
Jen hung herself
in her ex-boyfriend’s apartment.
Her parents on the phone,
Jim and Nina,
called from California
where it was warm.
to tell us
Jen hung herself
in her ex-boyfriend’s apartment.

“Promise me,” she urged.
She made us promise
we wouldn’t do that,
we would never do that.

We promised and went back to watching
news of an impending war.
A war we could see
A war we could talk about.

We were kids in the living room
We didn’t know
we should have made her promise, too.
We couldn’t see
that one day she would wage her own war.
By the time we found out
It was already dark.

Lightening Storm

I examine the pill
and begrudge it its pink
when everything else seems
so dark
so murky

I resent
this new pellet that is
small and rosé,
blushing
And I doubt.

I doubt
for it is a wonder how anything
so little
can do
so much,
So much.
I cup it in my hands
and swig it
down with water,
And I wonder.

I wonder when I
awake late
in the night,
the first night of
the little pink pill,
I wonder when I
awake
to a headache

I wonder at the lightning
storm in my head

Flashes flying from frontal lobes
hit the temple
return to forehead

And in that moment
the flashes
the flickers
the flares

        illuminate

                recriminate

                        eradicate

the dark
the murk

And for the first time
in a long time
everything
is lined in
silver.

Nancy Phear survives her mother Janie Phear, who committed suicide less than a year after developing symptoms and less than a week after being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in October of 2004. Recently, Nancy herself was diagnosed with a mental health disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Single Episode. Her writing explores her relationship with her mother, her mother’s suicide, and her own mental health battles.

---

Douglas Polk

The Seizure

In my peripheral vision the explosions begin,
increasing with intensity and density as colors bomb the retina of my eyes.
Random and uncontrolled,
as if someone is loose with a pack of fire crackers,
until the whole pack lit.
The explosions began to come in waves,
rhythmic like the ocean.
I feel my pupils travel to the corner of my eyes,
attempting to find a place to hide,
as the explosions increase in frequency and volume.
Fear causes me to burrow into myself,
making myself small.
Tiny, with no mass at all,

set adrift in the black emptiness of nowhere.
with no idea of how long or of how far I have drifted,
in darkness I pray for light.
gradually becoming aware of a heart beat,
my heart beat.
The realization comes,
it is the same rhythm,
as the explosions which forced me within myself.
Unsettled and unsure,
I wait wondering if this is hell.
The explosions diminish as the heart beat becomes the focus of my existence.
Hearing quiet voices and seeing no more explosions,
I can breath freely once again.
Opening my eyes and seeing the tear streaked cheeks of my Mom,
as she whispers something in my ear.
I feel her lips upon my head,
while aware of quiet conversation taking place in the background.
Reassured I close my eyes to catch my breath,
and suddenly realize I am too tired or weak to again open my eyes,
as the serenity of sleep seduces my weary brain.

Post-Cancer Survivors

The sound of water pipes coming to life,
drives the sleep from my brain,
She showers to start the day.
Opening my eyes,
an attempt made to stifle a moan,
stifle the pain.
Inventory taken,
and judgment made regarding the day,
as footsteps heard across the kitchen floor,
her breakfast made.
Pain stabs,
and muscles throb,
blankets pulled back to greet the day.
Television voices heard,
part of her routine,
As she checks the news,
and the weather,
soon she will be off to school,
teaching children to read,
exposing them to worlds which know no bounds.
as I sip coffee and give thanks,
for this woman who is my wife,
She who is as much a survivor as am I,
washing my face and brushing my teeth,
wondering all the while where has the ‘old me’ gone,
later attempting to focus my mind,
and learn once more,
how to write,
rediscovering and exploring this post cancer world.

The Disaster

a seizure last night,
like an earthquake,
or other natural disaster,
a soul shattering event,
the damage evident today,
in his rigid body,

muscles abused almost beyond endurance,
attempt to assess,
and mend themselves in stillness,

The cost visible on the lines of my wife’s face,
the pain in my heart,
and the worry in a brother’s voice,
when told of the disaster,
in the early morning of his college day,

The seizure grand mal,
or clonic tonic,
but words, do the event no justice,
like any natural disaster,
it can not be adequately described,
only experienced.

Douglas Polk is a poet living in the wilds of central Nebraska with his wife and two boys. He has had numerous poems, three books of poems, and two children's books published. Poetry books are: In My Defense, The Defense Rests, On Appeal. The children's books are: The Legend of Garle Pond, and Marie's Home.

His son experienced a stroke in the womb, and began life facing the challenges of life threatening seizures, cerebral palsy and developmental delays. He is now a talented 22 year old, who delights people with his writing, painting and picture taking.

---

Aaron Poller

Paying Attention

The early warning signs of cancer were
neither early nor were they a warning,

more like vague apprehension, change,
because isn’t anxiety about

the future, the unknown that lies ahead
as we squeeze through living day by day,

until the body says stop and we must
pay attention to the nose on a face,

the breath coming from each nostril,
the bass line, some acoustic jazz

playing along over the radio,
if we still have radios,

how voice and piano open
that twin line, how they sweep

into the waiting center, eyeless
world where the mustard seed

becomes a dream,
a song evoking home.

Healing After Surgery

What happens when we sit alone?
When noise of day and daze are done?
We face the silence of living.

Is that prayer or escape?
Will the world come back
or may we travel far, not return?

Psychologists believe
in dissociation. Buddhists
believe in emptiness.

Perhaps the soul is a bird
that comes to sing,
then decides to stay,

build a nest, settle here.
This morning questions
are enough. Let us down these

wings of anger. Let anybody
heal into the world, into
the silence of living.

Aaron Poller is a nurse psychotherapist and poet who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C. Last year diagnosed with prostate cancer, he had surgery in May and is now doing well. He is continuing to work and write and both he and his wife are currently looking forward to the birth of their first grandchild.

---

DC Reid

I have let the river carry me

Who will untangle their matted hair?
Shine in the dark hole of their sleep?
Though they rattle the stones in their broken brains,
in their thicket of words, who will find a way,

Love’s Pavilion                          - PK Page

Who will untangle their matted hair
at the foot of their bed, the foot of my brain?
I have morphine love on the line.
I press my love once and once again
and sleep shall have dominion until I
wake and press again. I see for free
the naked lunch I wait for, and
the stomach of mine turns for the morphine
I’ve dripped into my freeways, my chaos
theory veins in my winter brain. Do they

shine in the dark hole of their sleep?
Oh, when I’m gone it’s not deep,
sudden, drowning, it’s really a nothing,
an unplugging of plug I do not keep,
for death is in everything at all times.
And the millions of salmon with fine
fenestrated bones when Alder leaves are
yellow. I have let the river carry me among
coho lined up as red arrows, not shooting
but waiting in deep November.

Though they rattle the stones in their broken brains,
the casks and rattle pods of seed explains
the pyrocanthus, the split pea, and the stones of peach.
I have a love of all alone in wilderness plains
that wait for me, when only I and the elk heavy
feet leave hearts of their going and coming
at the flattest shallowest crossing spot.
In the camouflage season I wait alone,
as an arrow, a heart with out its veins,
a song without its man, a story without an end.

In their thicket of words, who will find a way?
As though the mansion of our world’s a play
not far away, where the roads can stand
the view. Man is man’s best friend. Say
we speak and are conversant. We hold
a hand, a Hamlet, and conjure a Heathcliffe,
or a Haggar, some mental celluloid residue.
In the forest of green, the sea of green.
All humans with too much story in them.
The wild escapes when I am dilaudid.

An Ode an Elegy a Cancer

The tendering of my burden

be it down on flesh taken in the lens and made a permanence that makes the eye cry out at the end of itself

The lead wafers in the round machine much the same as stitching and its eye an aperture of the lead

The machine in skirts of curtains ones from heights where opera can be seen by faces of half faces these are the same as the opening where light that has no light comes through

The trees of my abdomen redness of lasers mark the cross of Jesus thrown down the holy water that burns invisible

And the scars? There are no scars only what is left when forest is taken away

The skin of my belly that in my hands lifts away from itself as I stand with pants to knees and with my underpants down from my dugs and me in my eyes in my mirror and this is the age in the middle when I no longer fear my image in its sunset the sloughing of years goes unnoticed brown bits of flesh take my face and my eyes upon my eyes is a Mona Lisa

Shall I stroll the rolling stones of Ross Bay that in morning can be heard one on one another on another ones the D-9 cats left to keep the hungry ocean from taking land into itself

The sea is no gristling red woman whose glory bleeds upon the water and in its smallest sound is each round vessel opening through the door of water from farness to the eye

I have left behind my x-rays in their albums that in their own dust resign themselves to the yellow pale of eggs

The way the body’s clothes when taken will hold a little warm

The bruised gun of evening nothing more

DC Reid has published ten books of poetry, novels, literary non-fiction, and non-fiction. But his adult life has been marred by a number of health issues. He has had chronic fatigue syndrome for about 20 years and has given advice to CFS sufferers on his Web site at www.dcreid.ca. In his early fifties he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Two separate radiation and drug treatments later, it appears he is in remission. However, his hip degenerated and had to be replaced. Now he is suffering from disc degeneration in his back. He writes from an intimate knowledge of illness.

---

G.A. Saindon

Midnight at the Clinic and Beyond

The moon, a yolk, engorged,
pauses somber, cloudless,
lights stiff doors, doors sealed
to hold all tools safe and cool
against the sunlight likely tomorrow.

A shadow bars the eyes of windows;
the empty path trod and brittle
from sudden feet, while the moon
pales, rising more slowly than breathing
through dreamless nights in fine sheets.

By apogee all shadows save those
of the sleepless trees rescind, become one
with the building, a darkness inherent,
utter and unafraid of daylight
or the moon’s recusant midnight eye.

The Scavengers

We are scavengers all –
crows and buzzards
after the carrion of life.

Scrounging shells on the beach
beautiful, rough ugly, or
merely novelties, once

useful to other creatures,
now tossed by waves
and small children.

We adults keep the lamp
of street urchins near
our bed, head, instead

of dousing it, to look
forward and future.
We scavenge for acceptance,

compassion, love, in the taverns,
churches, schools, intersections
and places richly grim,

but prodigal with those things
that smell like luck,
like fare, like meat.

biography is missing

---

Anne Shaughnessy

You Left the Refrigerator Open

          That’s how I knew. You didn’t notice your hair jutting out sideways or half your mouth dragging down when you tried to talk.
          You would not let me call the hospital or your doctor, so I sprinted upstairs, found your brown metal phone book yet couldn’t remember your doctor’s last name. So I thumbed through the whole thing and found it anyway.
          In the kitchen, you watched me slow-motion dial the yellow rotary phone.
          “Call an ambulance. Don’t wait,” the receptionist said.
          The paramedics took you away. You probably don’t remember any of this.
          Later, I brought my dog to the rehab, and you fed her your hospital Hoodsie. We watched Seinfeld every night. You half smiled as you told me your hospital neighbor liked it when I wore shorts.
          In a month, you came home. I know you remember that. You could not swallow solids, but you were home.

* * *

          The next stroke blacked out half your brain. That’s what your doctor told us. Even so, when he asked how you were, you said, “Fine.”
          That first night of your second stroke, I sat up with you to watch the Red Sox. Your machines beeped as I narrated the game. I told you Manny was barely walking to a ball that dribbled out to left. You laughed past the frozen side of your mouth. “He always does that,” you said.
          Your night nurse fell in love with you in less than a day. She cried when she hugged you goodbye. You might remember that.
          Then it was hospital, rehab, hospital, rehab, hospital, nursing home. And you never came home. C Diff, pneumonia, C Diff, pneumonia, swallow test upon swallow test upon swallow test. And you never came home.
          You thought I was on trial for murder.
          We still watched Seinfeld almost every night.
          You promised to get me a good lawyer.
          You could no longer see but saw movies in your mind. You won’t remember them as anything but real. You told me about the two blonde nurses who were sisters. They bathed you. I liked when you told me that dream and wished for my own blonde nurses.
          Afternoons, I sometimes left work early to wheel you around outside the brick building. “When I say ‘I love you,’ I mean it,” you said, your harsh voice letting me know I was in trouble for not remembering that.
          On the rare Friday night, I brought beer to your room. We watched the Sox together. You still remembered every player and what team he’d been traded from, yet you couldn’t drink even a sip of water past your feeding tube. My dog licked the drips from your machine, like it was chocolate milk you poured out just for her. Broken blood vessels rouged your shadowy cheeks, as though you were healthy still.
          That Christmas, we gave wine and cards to every nurse. You dictated the notes to me.
          As many times as you asked, I refused to toilet you. If you had been well, you never would have wanted your daughter seeing you that way.
          Every four minutes, you asked me to find someone to bring you to the bathroom. I hope you don’t remember the feces gunked under your nails when the staff didn’t clean you right. Those dark crescent fingernails, the smell I’d like to forget.
          You thought I was still on trial for murder. When I reminded you that I’m a pacifist, it didn’t matter at all.

* * *

          The last January, the last swallow tests, the last procedure, the last days, last hours in the snow-bright room, we sang to you past your morphine, tried to sing you out of your fear. “I will bear you up, on eagles’ wings,” we sang, your favorite song, your tenor voice behind ours, somewhere.
          Your nurse didn’t laugh when I told her I wanted a few drops of morphine to go. You would have laughed had you been awake.

* * *

          At your wake, we dressed you in your favorite St. Patrick’s Day sport coat, kelly green to match the shamrocks on your tie. Of course you won’t remember that.
          Your memory has pushed into mine now. I go to your childhood home and remember the seven-year-old you, punching your sister in the arm after the scarlet fever shots. I remember how much you hated the quarantine, how you longed to be outdoors.
          I remember the Flood of ’27, when you were just four and so euphoric after the river swept the outhouse away. Six months later, you returned home to several inches of silt still blanketing the basement. Standing at the kitchen sink, you and your mother hand scrubbed each piece of coal. You heard her swear for the first and only time of your life. “It’s all right, Mum,” you cooed. I remember it all for you.

Anne Shaughnessy holds an MFA in fiction from Emerson College. Her poetry has appeared in Illya’s Honey and won the Dallas Community Poets Award. She recently was awarded a residency at the Norman Mailer Center, where she finished In Your Own Landscape, a novel which explores the effect of mental illness on the whole family.

"You Left the Refrigerator Open" involves her experiences taking care of her father, Jim Shaughnessy, who was one of her best friends. After his second stroke, he lost the ability to see, but his mind filled in what he was missing. Anne reads extensively about discoveries in the field of neuroscience and is particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of “phantom limb.”

---

David Sloan

Sea Treasure

He floats face down in six feet
of water, oblivious to the rasping
dune grass and the decaying fish
tangled in the shore’s kelp line.

Equipped with mask, snorkel,
Wetsuit and one blue flipper,
A size too small, he peers
At the seascape below and feels uneasy.

He thinks of his mother
Who would still be sleeping
If the pain had not awakened her.
She might be fingering a photograph

Of herself posing in the yellow swimsuit
Or she might be studying the cut
Flowers in the vase, or the curtain
Pulled back to let the light in,

Anywhere but under the cotton gown
To the bandage covering the sutured line
Beginning at her breastbone
And ending just under her arm.

He looks for a treasure to send her
But he begins to feel unmoored.
His unflippered foot scrapes against a rock
And draws a bead-cloud of blood.

Reaching down between the ribbons
Of kelp and the billowing rockweed,
He prods a crab into movement.
It shuffles under a ledge. He pokes another

But it is dead and slips sideways down,
Landing on the mussel shells, jagged
Like pottery shards. Then he sees it—
Humped over a mussel. It draws him

Down. He stretches, pulls up
The starfish, with four rays and the nub
Of a promise. When it dries, its curled
tips will tilt on her sill, like a hand
saying Stay.

Heartsick

So when I say that I am sick at heart
please understand no faithless wife has left me,
no daughter’s lying crumpled in some culvert.
And while I fret about the rising seas,
the real betrayal began a year ago—
a trapped bird in my chest, battering the bars,
followed by an airless hush—the low,
growing hum a guard might hear far
down a corridor, that yawning silence
from an escapee’s cell. Then a rogue
rhythm arose, some drunken drummer’s sticks
tattooing a beat no dancers could follow.
He never left. Between flutters and jams
he grins, then rat-a-   tats the man I am.

Stunned

At ten, nothing beat holding my breath
to bursting. In bed with eyes shut,
ears plugged, I’d vanish, sink like a diver
into bottomless inky waters,

and listen below the silence—
long pause of a sea god’s breathing—
for that surging thrum, shh-dum
shh-dum   shh-dum   shh-dum

those fingers drumming on a hidden hull,
steady as a string of bubbles. Later
I loped along mountain roads
loose-limbed, aqua-lunged, Olympian.

At times, when breath and blood converged
and beat in perfect two/four time, I floated
out of my shoes, sh-dum, sh-dum,
made the stretched skin of the sky my ocean.

Now I can’t hold a long note without gasping.
My tangled heart flops like a fish
reeled out of the sea, stunned into stillness
between thrashings, bewildered

by its sudden weight and a hard bottom.

A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine, David Sloan teaches in Maine’s only Waldorf high school. He lives with arrhythmia, and is the proud owner of a tiny slinky in his left descending coronary artery. His mother, now in her late eighties, has been a breast cancer survivor for nearly twenty-five years. His poetry has appeared in The Broome, Café, Naugatuck River, Northern New England and Prairie Wolf Press Reviews, Carpe Articulum, Enskyment, Innisfree and Passager. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

---

Megan Stolz

A Sestina for Erik

A physiological lesson: when the human bone tears,
in medical terms we call this a fracture.
The body is stabilized, x-rays are given to doctors to read;
printed at the bottom in plain black type: Stolz, Erik.
We like to remind ourselves that "they happen," accidents,
and maybe by reminding ourselves we'll stave our pain.

Which is worse: physical or emotional pain?
I'd rather cry myself than see my mother's tears.
The results, when man and car collide, accidentally,
apparently include concussions and multiple fractures.
Visiting hours start in sixty minutes; while waiting to see Erik
there's nothing to do, nothing but magazines to read,

and once every section of People has been read
all we masochistically can find to discuss is pain.
The phone calls start; every ten seconds all I hear is, "Erik,
Erik, Erik," everyone wants to know. Dad holds back tears
as he explains in clinical terms the fractures,
the sedation, the respirator, and the cause: an accident.

For our sanity, we dismiss fate and call it an accident.
And then our children hand-make cards and we bring in red
balloons for cheer, and we talk, but don't think, don't want to fracture
into a million pieces. Consciousness brings pain,
better to smile and let the paper pamphlets in our hands tear
as the only sign that we're not okay. Erik,

are you okay? Answer with your eye lashes, Erik,
and maybe it's better that you don't remember the accident,
can't recall what it feels like when your bones tear.
To fill this empty, cold hospital room we'll read
Calvin and Hobbes comics, we'll take pains
to keep our calm masquerade from fracturing

in front of you. Relieving laughter, "now this joke'll fracture
you," we'll pass around the comic, narrate it to Erik
who can't yet talk, can't yet open his own eyes. Pain's
a bitch. This is not your fault, definition of an accident,
and though now you may feel like a broken reed,
love will weave you so tightly you'll never tear

again. No, though you've fractured, you'll never tear,
painful as this crucible is. Don't try to read
meaning into why you're here, Erik, it was just an accident.

Megan Stolz is a second-year candidate in the University of Baltimore's MFA program. She earned her bachelor's degree from Hollin University and is originally from California. In October 2011, her younger brother Erik was hit by a car while walking home. He has been recovering well and and has been going through therapy to regain full use of his leg.

---

Barbara Ellen Sorensen

Valley of Fire

The day you died
I was photographing red
yucca, little-leaf sumac, fire barrel,
lace, and rainbow cacti.
Smoketrees backlit bruised
with sunrise flared,
branches busy with the rising
inflection of snowgeese.
Asters pressed against New Mexico's
alabaster sand and sunset
swept over the bright yellow
amplitude of rabbit brush.

And you were dying, though I did not hear
or feel you. Later, I saw the dissonance
of death was in everything that day,
and everything could have been you:
abrupt shadows threading in and out long
between sun-bleached wooden crosses,
in a graveyard resonating
with charms and votives;
the silence of the deaf promenading
past the Valley of Fire,
ebony lava furrowing itself
furiously across the semi-arid land.

Wings, wings
your body must have pled,
as it struggled with its seizure.
Nothing heard you,
not even birds. There were no warning
song patterns, just restless scratching
through air. There were no birds
that could have carried
your spirit that day, even with their deep-netted
formations, upward-arched,
across invisible miles,
back into my body,
to rest one last time,
my heart’s desert willow
beating full with air, breath.

Sky Islands

I dream my youngest son walks
with me to the edge
of a teal-colored alpine lake.
I dream it sparks blue embers
and reflects only that I may
have imagined my son's
entire existence. I dream my own face
transfigured in blue-veined
icicles melding into cobalt
wave after wave. I dream
the epiphany of frost
hushed across cottonwood branches,
and willow in early spring,
the very day my son came to me.
I dream of bells, cornflowers,
and the effervescence
of bodies being born to dream.
I dream of undulations
and how the Maya blue
sky remembers
my son’s journey even when
I have forgotten. I dream
I am beside a tarn that holds
one boulder tumbled
down from fields of many.
I dream the act of its falling
has clarity, as if in falling
it creates a line, a scar as blue
as the cord from which
my son floated, whole,
perfect. I dream my son
dances on some far land,
his young body moving
from space to space, valley to valley.
I see him beside midnight
blue lakes where he beckons, radiant.

Water From Oar

A nurse comes to my bedside,
pushes my shoulder
gently, rousing me at 3:00 a.m.
It’s when they like to do the CT scans,
she tells me, and suddenly all the world
comes rushing back.
I can’t feel my head; it’s still numb.
My companion this night,
is sleeping, one arm crossed
over her eyes as if she is shielding
herself from a light
she doesn't want to see.
Her hair falls in a thick knot
around her shoulders
and I remember how it felt
in my hands after she broke her back
and I leaned over the tub
to wash out the tangles, her arms too weak
to lift the curled heft. As I washed
her hair, I could smell wood smoke,
juniper, slickrock, perfumes
swept down with the river’s
big water and the kayaks. As they wheel
me to radiology, I think
about how I’d sit for hours
on the banks of the Colorado, just to watch
her graceful rolls,
the way she separated
water from oar. Her laughter
as she plummeted under
and then sprung back upward,
split through solemn canyon walls.
I am lucky; though I have awoken
once again into tumultuousness
of illness, I feel her pushing,
pushing me to a river’s
eddies, to safety.

Barbara Ellen Sorensen is a poet, writer, and editor. She has lived with Parkinson’s Disease for over 10 years. In summer 2010, she underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS), for which she is eternally grateful. Her son, Bryon Michael Sorensen, died in fall 2011 from complications of an alteriovenous malformation (AVM). These poems reflect the ongoing process of reconciling both circumstances, however, she continues to believe in the beauty and elegance of life.

Barbara recently had her chapbook published, Song from the Deep Middle Brain. It's available from Main Street Rag Publishing. It was a finalist in the 2011 Colorado Book Awards.

---

Emily Treakle-Chase

Hospital

Sick tissue feels
like hard rubber,
hiding bones

There’s no difference
between muscle and fat

Thin bodies turn large
Thick bodies turn small

Bruises appear
out of nowhere

Joints refuse to bend,
Mouths get sticky,
Eyes dry out

Some people let it happen
with no visible anger or regret

Others complain,
feigning ignorance as
to why their bodies
have betrayed them

They don’t know that
I can feel it,
the sickness doesn’t
hide from me

I try to work it
to make the tissue
normal again

Sometimes it works

I wish they couldn’t
see the hopeful, sorry
look in my eyes

I’d take it from them,
if I could,
but, I don’t want it either

Scene from a Nursing Home

  “I won’t give up on them.”

Without judgment
I uncover
her swollen feet

Neglectful, forgetful maybe,
she had
slid into
a size 6

Now her sister knits
extra wide slippers
for her diabetic feet

No sores
I grasp her toes

Sigh

Silence thumps loudly
as we wait
for her to relax

When she does let go,
her feet slip
into lateral rotation

Hands move
lightly
respectfully

“I’m not going to give up
on them.
I’m not ready to go without them.”

I don’t really
want to touch her feet-
they’re squishy

There’s no way
I can find her bones
They’re lost in
all the fluid

But someone
had painted her toenails
a pearly pink

Holding feet is part of my job
It might help her
hold onto her feet

Emily Treakle-Chase is a Licensed Massage Practitioner in Western Washington. She finds inspiration from all her patients and is learning from them how to deal with her own health issues.

---

Gary Turchin

I’m Not Going To Tell You Everything Is All Right

I’m not going to tell you everything is all right,
That getting a debilitating,
          methodically disabling
                    chronic illness
has made me a richer, better, more enlightened person,
That I’ve made peace with the war inside
Made friends with my enemies
Made love to my beloveds
Made a compact with my God
Made myself a man amongst men.
I have not.
I have not.
I have only stood shoulder to shoulder with my frailties
Leaned on them
Had them lean on me
Stood amongst the broken weeds
Bled
Cried
Picked up my bags
And carried them down the road as before
As before

There is a difference though
There is

The load is oddly lighter
When you can’t carry more
Less becomes you
Less and less becomes you
Not that you
or I
are less
Just that less truly is more
And that’s what I do have to tell you.
that less truly is more
drop a bag
drizzle a few drips away
in the end
not even skin
is worth its carry
worth its wait
or weight
in gold

shed even this
you garden snakes

the only load
I can discern
on the only road
worth its weight
in marigolds
is the abundant sparkle
of kindness—
As much to self as other—
And forgiveness,
The rich deep plunge of forgiveness,
To self
as much as to others

Not that I have forgiven
mind you
or been truly kind
I’m not going to tell you everything is all right
Remember?
Just that I can’t carry the load of so much loathing—
As much to self as other—
As I could before
And so it is the debilitating walk
That makes the walker lighter,
And so it is,
My condition—
My new friend and comrade—
that strips me of my stripes
And leaves me defenseless.
And so, given no choice,
I celebrate defenselessness
I defend it

Come let’s walk
There’s dripping to do
And dripping to be done

Remember, I’m not going to tell you everything is all right.

Second Chances

I wonder if the Universe got a second chance
would it still use the same old trick:
the Big Bang,
to invent itself?
Bit of a showy start, if you want to know the truth.
Maybe it had no choice,
technology had not evolved
and it really only had one good tool to pry it all open,
unbounded energy,
and so it erupted
like a petulant child—
One as big as God—
and so we have a petulant universe
always throwing fits
tossing babies with the bathwater,
But in the calm open seas between storms
something akin to a God
swims in the easy current of awareness
and maybe, if we swim with it long enough,
learn is permutations, embody its rhythms,
enough of its moxie, without the mayhem,
will rub off
and we, too, will swagger
toward some unknown moment
where our charge will meet its fuse
and everything we say and do
will erupt into a firework of stars
and galaxies
and spiraling comets
and life-supporting suns
and even the pitter-patter of little feet
and the water will stay in the tub,
all warm and safe,
all of us, warm and safe,
this time around.

Gary Turchin is a poet, artist and performer, and the author/illustrator of the wondrous If I Were You (2011 Simon DeWitt) See www.garyturchin.net. For the past 7 years, Gary has battled with Parkinson’s disease, but he continues to write, perform, and illustrate and says he is producing the best work of his life. Gary created, produced and performed a one-man comedic poetry show for kids, which he has performed in more than 300 schools and libraries throughout California (www.garyturchin.net). “My art and writing are my medicine,” he says. He has a one-man show about his battle with Parkinson’s called The Healthiest Man on Earth, A Poet’s Journey with Parkinson’s

---

Bobbie Valentine

Killing the Axe man

A body bent on betrayal,
plotting in secret and waiting to spring.

Flogging me again and again,
always to my horror.

Growing darkness under the surface,
encased in my enemy with no reprieve from its prison.

I refuse to be a docile inmate.
I fight and hold secret meetings of my own
to design my last stand.

To thwart the persistent harrier to whom I’m bound one hundred years.
I choose victory...Tell the axe man to run.

A sufferer of Chiari Malformation & Syringomyelia.  This is a condition that in simplified terms squashes the base of the brain into the spinal column.  In 2003 she had brain surgery to decompress the area so that she could remain alive and breathing (much to the dismay of her enemies). She lives in constant pain that she chooses to medicate with sarcasm and laughter.  Her illness has inspired a new motto and way of life for her: Live your lives with love, laughter and compassion...but most of all remove your filter and speak your mind.  You never know when it will be your last opportunity.

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Marian Veverka

Lady Bountiful

All summer her kitchen overflowed with fruit
Such strawberry sweetness, a little rhubarb added
Poured into small glass jars , gleaming with
Ruby promises

Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, the wild
Varieties - sweeter than the tame, plucked from
Thickets, scratches on the hand and arms, attacks
From angry squawking birds, purple lips and
Purple hands, rewarded we carried home jams
And pies made from the bottled fruit.

And pickled, “got pickled” she joked while she
Attacked the garden – cucumbers, beans, squash
Pint jars topped with head of flowering dill.

Peaches, apples, plums and pears, the orchard
Did not escape her kettle; many a moonlit night
The moon itself a ripe fruit dangling overhead
While a thousand crickets chirped their serenade.

Then the tomatoes – nothing but work – why did
She plant so much? “The grandchildren”, she’d
Answer and point with pride, the rows of bright
Red jars waiting to be added to sauces, spagetties

Salsas, chilies, juice. She’d feed the world if she
Could. No one left her kitchen without a jar or two.

She’d puff for breath when climbing up the cellar stairs.
Then laugh off our concern. “I’m 70, what do you
Expect” We wanted to say “Slow down a bit, Your
Shelves would feed the town for years.” We never did.

It was the mailman, on his bitter February rounds who
Noticed her lights still on. He stopped to check, then
Called the 911 squad who hurried but it was hours
Too late. A stream of red ran down the cellar stairs.
Tomato juice, she had a jar clasped in each hand. It
Could have been her life-blood, poured out for all to
Share. Her bounty divided among all those in need

That summer it was a shock
To see her garden, bare

Autumn Sacrament

In the street where we lived
Smoke like blue bubbles
Rising from piles
Of run-away leaves
Maples and oaks
Beeches and sycamores
Threw down their burdens
dancing for joy
Down all the sidewalks
Watched the leaves turning
To colors we gathered
and raked every yard
Had its own offering
Ready and waiting for
Fathers to kneel
Squatting before them
With matches in hand
Flames rocketing skyward
Explosions of color
A one-minute offering
So quickly they
Sink into dark
Ashes glowing
Spirits ascending
In great plumes of
Smoke hiding our faces
Erasing the stars.

After the Warning

As I was saying before those warning sirens sounded
And I don’t mind admitting to a little fear
For none of us knows what is about to happen
And we’ve had some very bad storms so far this year
Perhaps instead of listening to my lecture
We put some music on and settle back and listen
And talk together softly if you want to.
The truth is what I was going to say—just doesn’t
Seem important. When the sky turns green and
The air is filled with warning...
We still don’t know where it might have touched down
If anyone wants to say a prayer, no one will care
If the power goes out, they’ll send us all back home
Which I do believe is where we all belong.

Marian Veverka has written poems, short stories and two unpublished novels. Her poetry has recently appeared in “Moondance” Magazine, the anthology “Bigger Than they Appear”, “A Prairie Journal” & “Occupy Poetry.” She has won prizes and awards for her work. She is a retired librarian, a mother, grandmother and gardener. She lives in “Ohio’s Lake Erie Vacationland.”

Marian Veverka has been diagnosed with “Parkinsonism” a condition of the central nervous system, which as yet has no cure. Parkinsonism includes several diseases of the CFN including Multiple System Atrophy. Unfortunately, a true diagnosis can only be made at autopsy.