Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts

5/3/17

Five of Swords, for all my death girls - Marty McConnell

Betsy’s in the second stall practicing
with a plastic razor, so I lie on the floor
to listen for the janitor, the cart’s

loose wheel squeaking our names down
the evening-empty hallway. the weeks
she was at Lutheran General, I didn’t

go to visit. but I know from her stories
what the doors looked like, closing,
how they strapped her to the bed
for her own protection. we’re 17

and I adore her despair. I think she’s shining,
fearless, carving herself a body that’s nothing
but light. on the way home, she lets me
drive. tells me there’s a trick

to disintegrating in increments subtle enough
not to trip the alarm wires, to hiding cigarettes
and death from therapists and parents and this,

all my girls have had down: how to go and go
until the night is too fragile or grimy
and then the fanfare, the wild dive

from the spire, the water tower, the clock
yanking its hands back, how to dangle
from the spotlight once everybody’s
watching. 1999: we lie on Angie’s futon

searching the phonebook for institutions
that will take her without insurance, curl
our bodies into still commas of want
to wait for morning. they take

her shoelaces, and her cigarettes, and I watch.
they give her forms and more forms
and I watch. they walk her to the room

with its single bed and single dresser
and unsmashable mirror and I ride
the long, high buzz of the door back

to New York. 2003: Georgiana is an expert
in suicide and poetry. her medicine cabinet rattles
like a jar of vengeful bees. she wants me
to find her. all our idols are martyrs, not one of them

a saint. her hair drops like cabernet all the way
to her waist. and how she needs me. my simple body
becomes bread in her mouth, I’m whiskey,
an obliteration who’ll get up in the morning

to call the hospital and make coffee. oh,
my pretty ones in love with the beast
of disappearing, there are many ways

to give birth. not one is without pain.
there are almost as many ways to die
as there are to love. tonight, I drink to you

who chose to keep going, who moved
through my body like a chemical
I could not keep. the night stands outside
like a hungry dog on an old chain, the scent

of lilies rising from the half moons of his teeth.
go ahead. tuck your babies into bed
and lovers’ hair behind their soft ears, as if
there’s nothing left to fear.

10/4/16

Norris Cancer Institute - Sholeh Wolpé

He, dying.

Air dancing, sun shining
somewhere out there.

And I walking the corridors, looking
for an exit.