Cascade
by Steven Gordon
You murmur my name
vibrating my drums
and little bones
stimulating my brain
with a soft sigh
as the fall of snow
kissing the ground
in nearly silent whiteness...
General Anesthesia
by Andrew Merton
You feel a pinch and away you go,
a small boy again,
whirling through that corridor you’ve read about,
all the way down to a joint called Heaven,
a worn ballroom on Seventh Avenue,
wher...
Chemo
by Andrew Merton
in memory of Jane Pufky Nesbitt
In ‘65 David drove her east,
this secretary from Syracuse,
to meet his college buddies.
David in a Red Sox cap,
unveiling Jane like next year’s...
Biopsy
by Andrew Merton
The surgeon carves a slice from my tongue,
the bit, as it happens,
containing the letter L.
In a week, he says,
it will give us an answer.
Meanwhile,
lust disappears,
la...
Nebulizer
by Terry S. Johnson
I carefully fill the canister and place
the mouthpiece correctly. My inhale
begins across the diaphragm and stops
short too soon at the lower ribs, so
clogged with pneumonia are my lu...
Iris
by Terry S. Johnson
Not the spring flower catching
rain in delicate whorls
but the concave disc
inside the eye gathering light,
breathing in photons as the brain
exhales understanding.
The doctor’s...
Surprise at Sunset
Lift off
beyond sixty,
and here my heart
as flutter-fed as
any girl’s.
The patchwork years
blew by. Still, I
in some odd state
I dodge as not senescence
have faith that few will note
and fewer ca...
Light
I saw an old friend at the supermarket,
a friend of my firmer flesh and lighter heart days
I heard that she’d been ill –
that big, mutilating women’s disease
We exchanged the discreet inquires of suburban m...
Inheritances
1.
Calculate mattress undulations 5:00 am, upstairs. Meiosis in her fallopian tube shortly after, determined by timing of ovulation, not coitus. What is the susceptibility gene? Pocket watch reflected in the...
Les Mouchoirs*
As I sit here in our one-star hotel in Paris
I think of my father,
chronically ill these six months,
physically changed, frail and smaller.
This spring, his eighty-seventh year,
I’m buying him
old man h...