from Gabriel

Edward Hirsch

The evening with its lamps burning The night with its head in its hands The early morning

I look back at the worried parents Wandering through the house What are we going to do

The evening of the clinical The night of the psychological The morning facedown in the pillow

The experts can handle him The experts have no idea How to handle him

There are enigmas in darkness There are mysteries Sent out without searchlights

The stars are hiding tonight The moon is cold and stony Behind the clouds

Nights without seeing Mornings of the long view It’s not a sprint but a marathon

Whatever we can do We must do Every morning’s resolve

But sometimes we suspected He was being punished For something obscure we had done

I would never abandon the puzzle Sleeping in the next room But I could not solve it

Duplex for the Sick & Tired

Kay Ulanday Barrett

after Jericho Brown

A poem can spasm, stretch, but it can let salve in. There aren’t enough pages for the longing. There aren’t enough pages for the longing drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs.

Drenched in medicine bottles and ice packs, our aches sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in denial. Those who sing beyond joints and stethoscopes in denial, how do the symptoms stack your days?

Let’s name the stacks of dangerous symptoms: News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over. News coverage, the state, strangers who say the pandemic is over as I dream about a world that celebrates all of us.

As I dream about a world that celebrates all of us fully, Let’s allow poems to stretch. Let the salve in.

Palm Springs

Christian Gullette

We drink Fernet by ironic sculptures under misters that make our bangs damp.

It’s our anniversary,  though that time feels faint.

We are searching for a place to escape his diagnosis,

laws against gay marriage, our leaky, flat roof.

Every Memorial Day  and Labor Day, we go to the desert.

Sometimes also the Fourth  of July.

Palm Springs rewinds things. We almost buy that mid-century chair

proud of our rule that love for it  needs to be immediate.

At the Parker, a guy with a calf tattoo  brings drinks. 

You can ask for anything here. We toast to another year without cancer.

After dinner, we wander the hotel hedge maze, nowhere to go that late but home.

A Night in Morocco

Donal Mahoney

Middle of the night he flies out of bed

to the commode only to wonder

in the dim light minutes later

if that's blood or simply a good-bye

from his wife's stewed tomatoes,

a Moroccan dish she found on the web.

When he asked for a third serving

he pronounced them delicious.

So too, he said, was her dessert,

the Moroccan plum mousse

with the dark plums he likes.

Even with the ceiling light on

he doesn't know now what he sees

so with his medical history he's

speeding at midnight to the ER

where the doctor says better safe

than sorry and orders a fast

colonoscopy to solve the mystery.

The Waiting Room

One of mine, from 1996

He lay there apologetically, 

silent as a whisper, 

taking up a space so inadequate 

that it afforded only the most precarious foothold. 

Surely, the scent of the shadow of a rose would overpower him?

“I’m sorry” he husked, patting his chest, “I can’t talk”.

As if it mattered, as if it mattered…

I took his hand 

and said how pleased I was to see him 

but he was tired and wanted to sleep.  

And so I left, knowing that he would go shortly: 

my turn to feel apologetic and precarious. 

As if it mattered, as if it might make a difference…

No. Soon the wait will be over.

Prague

Stephen Dobyns

The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had a good life, I’d punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life?

Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann

in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much

is needed for all these unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?