My stepsons want to know
on a lazy Sunday morning what is the worst thing
I’ve seen. The worst thing, they repeat
as if I am unsure, as if I will deny them
what is always perched precariously
on the crumbling cliff
of my memory. I nudge
around the periphery.

Ah, there are so many sad things…

This is unacceptable. They are greedy
for the details, want to run their long fingers through it, crush it
like grapes in their hands now bigger than ours.

No! Tell us the worst thing.

Their Dad nods, tops off my coffee, runs the disposal.

Well, there was a man in the ICU. They lean forward

backs separating from the couch, bare feet
pressed flat against the hard wood floor.

He had melanoma. He belonged to another nurse.
But the ward was open, you saw everything

like a pig sliced open, freshly slaughtered. Like a magic trick multiplied
in a room full of mirrors.

I didn’t usually work in the ICU, they were short-staffed.

I had never seen suffering covered by so many tubes.

It looked like someone had poured hot asphalt over his body, all the way
from his neck to his groin. It was black and lumpy and bleeding. Like a volcano erupted onto his chest.

They are astounded that cancer could push through a body
so completely, take over both the outside, and the inside.

But he was really sedated, right? He couldn’t feel anything. Right? They decide

that must be the case and look up at me with earnest eyes, like a dog
before it is kicked. I lie

Yes, yes, he was sedated. I have let them down

with the dilution. The verdict:

That’s not that bad. The axis

bends back, righting itself. My husband gets up for a second
cup of coffee. The mail slides through the slot in the front door.
The dog barks as it fans out across the floor, like it is the first time.
The boys want waffles.

Perhaps love lies in the shadows
we know to hold inside: he was tied to the bed rails
in soft white cuffs circling his wrists and ankles. For 12 hours
I watched him pull against them, writhing, screaming –
loudly at first and then more softly as he tired –
calling us what we were: demons, tormenters
unholy bitches
holding him to this earth.

Patients I Cannot Forget: LE

You flew into clinic like a razor blade: sharp and shiny and ready. I had seen you every three weeks
for months but that day I did not recognize you. See, I only knew you beaten down by MG-114,
the neon-yellow-not-yet-approved-but-that-we-dripped-into-your-veins-anyway chemo. A drug
so precious we squeezed Kelly clamps with their tiny teeth around the IV tubing to make sure
you got every last drop. The thing about a Phase I trial is that it isn’t designed to actually help anyone, just to be
sure we don’t kill them, I overheard the doctor say to you, leaning over your small body swallowed up
in the recliner. You were so weak you just took that. And on the other side of the curtain, I just
took it too. Complicit. All those days you moved full of gray with the world rooted to your
cachectic frame, I thought that was who you were. Only with the poison paused could you come out,
like butterflies after a hurricane, disbelieving the still air. Like a child into the first snow of the
season, or a dancer after the blitz, pirouetting in satin shoes through the wrecked streets, kicking up
ash, punching your way through the smoky air. I step aside to let you pass.