Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

Window to the Bay

Sometimes I ask my patient, can you smell it?
Of course, she can’t. Necrosis happens slowly,
a little more each day. There’s time to adjust.

My birthday was weeks ago. The flowers are dead.
A clear square vase sits on the kitchen table,
its decay, vegetable. I am no stranger to the foul.

When I examine a blackened toe, I’m always
over-gentle, though the nerves are dead,
as are the muscle, the bone, the fascia.

Look how delicate: a burgundy rose, rimmed
with curls of black. When I touch it, I hear
the sound of tissue paper crinkled around a gift.

I enjoy the flowers, even in death.
My patient is embarrassed by her fetid,
dying appendage. A toe is lost, then

half a foot, then a leg below the knee.
She lies in her hospital bed, so pale she blends
into the bleached sheets. Still she is able

to retract her soul into the part of her body
that’s alive. I follow her gaze out the hospital
window. On clear days, I can see the bay.

About This Poem:

• Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, 2014, was the first publisher of this poem. The magazine went on indefinite hiatus in 2016 when the editors, Laura McCullough and Michael Broek parted ways.

• I wrote the poem at Stockton University in Spring 2013, in a class co-taught by Kathleen Graber and Stephen Dunn. They both influenced this poem as it emerged. My 59th birthday fell in January of that year.

• The original title for this poem was “Decomposition.” Like “Bird Neck,” it underwent a title change to better fit into the table of contents.