Issue 12 – Poetry

Your rivers are ablaze.
Red serpentine ulcerations

The strength of eyelashes
ought to be measured
but how?

Go outside at 2:32 a.m. when again,
you’re up but also down, the diagnosis
still trembling in your throat and guts,
no way to find ground until the next
doctor visit or scan, and even then,
what will you really know?

Giant moth fights its shadow,
Battering itself against the garage ceiling,
The day going down to dusk,
The opener’s bulb burning bright.

One cold Seattle morning,
I was wheeling out garbage bins to the curb
when an older woman stopped me.
Are you one of the medical students living in this house?

The battle is lost. It is finished.
Her world without end
has precipitously ended.

Hunt the vein,
inject the dye.
Lie back
and think of England.

Somewhere in the deep canvas of a coma you sleep
like a bear hibernating. Others have risen
from deep dark comas, but not you.

Welcome.
Walk in and make yourself at home-
however, you define that term now.
The meeting will begin shortly.

Into the grocery store I stroll, a soft sigh on my lips, the workday is done
My shopping list in hand, still much to do but at least it’s not work

We put a man in the highest place.
Why’d we do it? ‘cause of greed or race?

My ears ring with the music
of yesterday. Static
in the cochlea

For seven years from molded plastic chairs,
I saw what cancer consumes,
unsated by limbs or organs or hope.