poems – Pink Stinks

inside this love is a bird singing

at first no one spoke. no one looked up.

hope arrived in the form of this

one or that one: nurse, doctor, another cancer patient

looking past a head scarf to a smile. i pictured

birds: scrub jay, towhee, mockingbird;

finch, sparrow, dove—

who are you? i wondered, looking

into each one’s face. bird,

or man? woman, or wings?

the world’s glass melted into waiting.

half-awake, i listened. heard one voice fill the clinic

with sickness, spit. another moaned

hunger, hunger. another

two, a pair cooing, filled

this no-heaven with plans for hope’s

return. in a day one can make

all kinds of plans, i thought,

imagining a child trembling, leaning back, taking

chemo into her veins. little twigs. they looked

like the feet of birds, or imprints

from a mother or father who,

clinging to the girl’s thin wrist

dug in and gripped, and in

the only animal way possible,

said live.

I Hate Surgical Drains.

Imagine a large, plastic worm that drools liquid constantly. It is shoved through your chest skin and into your armpit, and its stomach sac, attached with a lengthy tube, wanders and slips over your belly like a rogue balloon.

Imagine that this worm’s belly must be drained twice a day. In the lengthy, slow, meandering draw down from your flesh into its rotund collections, there are flesh bits that look like fingers, raw chicken, fetuses.

Sleep on your back. Do not raise your arm.

Hourly you must shove this worm’s unruly flailings back into your pants.

Imagine that the reddish-orange fluid that gathers in the pool of this squirming hellion’s plastic gut is not blood. It is liquid detritus to be removed from the flood site. At times the colors of it evoke a sunset, which is pleasant enough except for the pus.

Getting dressed: 1. Place your shirt overhead first. 2. Let the garment rest on your shoulders for a few seconds. The tube must settle. 3. Slowly, so as not to shift your inwardly slithering medical reptile “buddy,” raise your arm and slide it gently through the sleeve. 4. Wait 10 seconds. 5. Repeat with the other arm. 6. Breathe a sigh of relief: the drain stayed.

In considering architectural innovations, ponder the labyrinth. Who is the monster? Who is the girl?

Drain, sucker.

Each flesh bit that leaves the body may be a part of the disease. One might celebrate. Might.

Imagine removing your clothes. The shower water rushes. The wildly gesticulating worm of tubular regurgitations must be subdued and restrained for the cleansing, and so, like a madhouse warden, you tape and tape and tape it not to a chair, but to your skin. Supervise its movement. There will be no violence today.

Absolution? Only with its removal. Call the doctor.

Call again.

Oh parasite, oh lollygagging and lengthy leftover lap lap lapping and long-remaining lily of the surreal translucent and post-surgical liquid stem linking loss to luck, little to less, longing to love and back again, you’re a lazy lurid river, a milliliter lover, a sewage leaver, convenience killer, a bendable lamentable wily water lure, a makes-it-hard-to-hold my daughter and my husband lank and lowbred dirty and late single-string lyre.

I hate you.