Women I’ve never met
I’m praying for women I’ve never met.
As I lay down and close my eyes, names tumble into my consciousness
Like cottonwood seeds, descending from a quiet, summer sky.
Each day I’m touched as the tangled threads of our lives entwine.
A daughter of a friend, a mother, a neighbor’s sister, cousin, co-worker.
One by one, they take their place in my nightly prayers:
Theo, whose tumor they hope to shrink. Lisa, who’s traded chemo for morphine.
Maureen and Suzanne, strangers all, but sisters of a stranger sort.
We’ve never met, but we have met the enemy
And it’s not us.
We’ve cried and cursed, wailed and shaken angry fists at a rotten fate,
at a physical failing, a cause unknown.
We’ve hoped and prayed, trusted, queried,
Asked, begged and believed
Until there are
no more words,
Only the slish of oars skimming the water,
Softly whispering, “Hope, hope, hope…”
August 21, 2009 --Teresa Schreiber Werth
I Know How The Story Is Supposed To
End
I keep waiting for
the woodsman
with his handy ax.
Instead I meet
wolves in white lab coats –
scalpels like
pointed teeth hide in their pockets.
Stethoscopes dangle
from their necks.
They answer my
questions in percentiles;
smile with
professional warmth.
Everywhere I turn
big eyes
examine me.
I am magnified in
images
of white on black.
I would run off the
forest path
but even bigger
teeth lurk nearby
quick to snap at weakness. --Suzy Lamson
Driving Across
The Bridge
The pavement slides
beneath my wheels like breath.
I am driving across this bridge
imagining the steel girders
above me are your ribs,
and the slow pulse
of the broken yellow line
is your pulse, and the dull
gray of the sky –
the color of the hospital ceiling.
I wonder if what I am seeing
is at all like what you see:
fog on the river, fog on the shore,
the red of a lighthouse fading,
windows, shingles
blending into white –
just the outline of the lighthouse,
the slender border
between it and everything,
all I can see,
just the faintest
outlines in fog. --Sally Bliumis-Dunn
The
Doctor at Her Dark Console
she
gestures at my breast’s eclipse.
beyond
a curve of sun,
calcified
moon mountains.
then
last year’s shot. nothing.
bleached
as an X-ray,
she
clicks from past to present,
present
to past,
making
me embrace
what
is needful:
spaghetti
straps of flesh
faintly
radiant,
permanent
marker
like
a titanium eyelash,
blinking target. --Angele Ellis
In
Northern Michigan, We Locals Always Dread the “Feelers”
Yet last summer I was too busy at the gloaming
of the solstice as I watched a fuchsia sky sweep
behind pines and dip into the ginger of the springs—
too busy to notice the clumps of cancer, (those feared “feelers”)
that were growing inside me, the dreaded “feelers”
that had started as a small still rock within
and begun to move, creep, from one tiny spot
of space to another,
from inner depths of breast to spine and brain.
Perhaps it was true, as my poet-friend had said
with disdain: that taking note of sunsets was passé
and my gaze was focused wrong
—outside and not within—
and all the while they were right here, those “feelers,”
grasping with their tentacles, crawling
around inside, as I sat on a rock, entranced,
and watched silent clouds
swirl into hibiscus lips of sky. --Judith A. Brice