If Mother Learns
I Am in the Hospital
She lets down the side of my bed,
rolls the thick heap of my father's body
on top of me.
She hangs his catheter bag,
plastic cracked and cloudy, black flakes
slipping out the side.
She hoists his IV bag,
empty now,
a gray ring of salt.
She reads for a long time next to my bed.
When I breathe in, his dry body presses me down,
his elbows bent like crooks of trees.
She jumps in with him,
"There, there," she says to him.
I cry out, but have no breath.
She rolls my father over like great log,
the sheets spark, and I smell seasoned wood,
smoking and cracking in the flash of heat.
She cries, "No!" and he blackens, bursts
apart, his hands snap, his legs crumble,
and my lungs fill
with ashes.
Kathy Abelson