An Exhortation
~sonnet by M. C. Yang

The guy with HIV is in bed nine
The breast cancer woman is in bed two.
The hyperglycemic person looks fine
And the head bleed went to the ICU.
The same drunk has returned again today
The demented woman will scream all night.
Another pneumonia is on the way
As are eleven wounds from a knife fight.
This guy plays piano in a jazz band;
That man was a college basketball star;
She writes books that are read across the land;
Do you even know who your patients are?
Doctors: Ask about their identities;
Patients are more than physiologies.

*

Surgeon’s Song
~Sid Schwab

I’ve touched you places none can touch,
Known of things that can’t be known,
Seen the unseen.

This is given me by you
Weighty trust that’s built on air.
You have granted me your life
Neither of us knows why.

Delicate brutality, transgression deified.
An act I cannot understand.
The space between the two of us
Will disappear impossibly
At one end.

If I could, I’d be your eyes,
Teach you what you’ve let me learn.
Earth and coils, a robin’s egg,
Architecture built to fail.
The beauty here’s for none of us.
But here I am.

If you heard the words I spoke,
If I were to help you know
The breath I held when we were there,
Would you recoil and wonder how
You ever said yes?

*

From Pluto, to the Scientists
~Jason Cohen

Dear Sirs,

It has recently come
to my attention that my status
as a planet in your fine
solar system has been
revoked.

While I have the utmost respect
for your commitment to impartial and
methodical inquiry, I cannot
help but wonder whether in
this particular case, you
might have acted somewhat
hastily.

For the sake of intellectual
thoroughness, I implore
you to reconsider
your decision, and invite
you to visit
me personally before passing
final judgment.

(I trust that this will not
be difficult for you – I mean,
since you know so much
about science and all.)

Look, I’ll level with
you: I have three
moons to feed, and
I’m still paying off
the loans for their
accretion. That I’m suddenly only
pulling plutoid pay hasn’t
made things any easier.

Yours happily last and least –
but no less – among the planets,

Pluto

P.S. Plutoid? Yeah, that really
makes up for it. Thanks a lot, @ssholes.

sucCessFul
~Scarlett

Waiting by the phone.
My life is on hold
Twenty two and dying.
So many things to say
but I’m running out of breath.
Coughing. Praying. Struggling.

The phone starts to ring.
The call I waited for.
The call they never expected.
A family losing their son.
Healthy new lungs for me.
Mourning. Praying. Rejoicing.

Two years pass by quickly.
Living boldly to honor your son.
Studying to become a doctor.
Your family is always on my mind.
Your gift has given me a future.
Breathing. Praying. Loving.

*

Untitled
~Barry Carter

I observed myself for the
first time in a dream,i
was looking through a
telescope viewing dried up
streams of Mars and preserved
in my static face i could see
lines created by the earth this
strange pitiless place. I didn’t
want to see wars only my face
and that of the sun, in the street
i could hear guns as i looked up
at the night time sky, gun runners
and drug dealers couldn’t see this
cosmic mystery. Vainly i tried other
telescopes hoping to be given sight
and on a bridge at night below me
was water of red, i put some money
in a telescope and could see the
empty streams of Mars with dried
up river beds.

*

Death Watch: Haitham
~Bronwyn Winters

We sit together and hold our silences,
Your eyes fluttering against such grave
weight- lids like tiny wings-
struggling rapidfire to regain the nest,
whipping
The void with fine dark feathers.
Drops skim off your frantic lash-wings,
and with my fingertips I press a kiss
into that salt.
Insh’Allah, soon, my tired child, you will
catch the updraft- Find the
Eagle’s purchase, and trace each new
wingbeat’s arc
a weightless infinity from where we
sit.

If I Were Frida Kahlo
~Amanda Hempel

Perhaps a ten percent chance, he said.
My heart slid across his perfect white wall
and I shrank under my paper sheet.

If I were Frida Kahlo,
I would paint my cystic ovaries
in a pale green thunderstorm sky.

If I were Frida Kahlo, my uterus
would hang in churning clouds
raining blood above salted earth.

With no god to blaspheme,
I cursed traffic, potholes, the fact
that I already knew her name.

*

Pas de Deux with Tiger
~Suzanne Edison

In hungry silence air feeds sparks:
my child’s body wrestles itself, predator
and prey, night paws

my mind. In dreams
I am orange-tongued fire
squealing through unsealed cracks.

I am split, a hard cone exposing
seeds, scorched brush that should
bare fresh ground but I wake

like Demeter wanting to banish
the Sun and blue-belled hyacinths,
command Winter strangle the world.

Ash dawn cracks the morning, strains
of my child’s breath rise
above sleep’s surface,

a canyon wren’s riff,
notes whole and held, counter-
point to my insistent roaring.

*

An ODE to Radioactivity
~Rahul Dandekar

One fine day, the century before last,
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!

But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.

Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)

The part of radioactivity that’s most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.

It’s random, jumbled, fumbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there’re fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous ‘ll be keen.

We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it’s brethen,
The number that sec breathin.

And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential – swear.

And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.

But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.

Or Strong
Ol’ Lead.
The end
result.

Tonight’s selections!

Untitled
~Elisabeth Greenwood

When they asked
that I write poetry
I died.

You see,
the words dried up
a long time ago.

Before doctors.
Before tests.
Before pills
and chemicals
and long vials
of blood.

Before,
I wrote books.
Published poems.
Scribbled madly
on paper scraps.
Spoke
to hushed crowds
and applause.

But something
in my spirit
became sick,
long before I learned
something in my body
was wrong.

So for long,
long,
there were no words.

There were notes
in many scripts.
Scripts
in many hands.

And there was loss.
And confusion.
And sadness.
And pain.

But there were no words.

Then.
Slowly.
Slowly.
There were
different words.
Plain words.
Kept alone.

They were not like
the old words.
Not like
these words.

But the words
slipped out.
A stream.
Found others’ words.
Who shared.
Who knew.

Those words
led to these words.

Maybe the spirit
is stronger than the body,
after all.

*

Tired and Afraid
~Chris Nickson

The curtains pushed aside
Show an old man in bed.
Fear lives in two dark eyes
Staring from his tired head.

His knuckled grip is strong,
He shakes like a sailor,
But his next breaths are long,
Payment for his labor.

Underneath his sun-beaten shell,
Sliding sinews bring bones upright.
What his muscle memory might tell
Given time before the birth of night.

The chart shows no sign of fever
And his heart beats just as it should,
The numbers say he’ll live forever,
All of the peaks and troughs look good.

My gut knows the answer,
But I ask anyway,
I am here to help you,
Why are you here today?

He says, my problem’s this,
Then looks me in the eye,
I’m just too tired to live
And I’m too afraid to die.

*

The fall.
~Impactednurse

And she lifted for a while, her eyes staring out with addled dryness from a place of dust and fallen leaves. Yellow sclera wide. Belly round and hard like an emu egg.
Lips dark as slugs.
Desperately drinking in the room, breathing it in, gulping it down.
The sights, the sounds, grasping at every detail as she grasped at my hand.

No that’s not quite it. She grasped as if at a rope. Like those men I saw in that old black and white newsreel who were holding the tethering ropes of a giant balloon, and held too long, and were carried aloft high above the field,
holding the rope,
knowing the cost of release,
and finally,
inevitably,
dropping. One,
by one,
by one.
Into dust and fallen leaves.

Another bit of poetry from the contest:

TO SYLVIA
~Maria A. Basile, M.D.

I am the sun, in my white coat.
– Sylvia Plath

The surgeon at 2 a.m. is not where you think she is.
She is not waging war on cancer.
She is not resting her 9 month
belly near the belly of a sleeping patient. She
is not answering another
solace-seeking call
from you.

She is not visiting her
sickest of patients. She is not
loving the husband she tells everyone about, but
barely touches.

She is not paying the mortgage. She
is not taking care of herself.
She is not even feeding
her baby.

The surgeon at 2 a.m. is
stroking sunset blood on college-ruled
canvas, breathing blue
abandonment between lines,
drenching gauze decay in bleach
and lye.

She is writing
for her life.

Please note the following credit:
“To Sylvia,” Touch: The Journal of Healing, Issue 1, May 2009, pg. 12; Strong Voices – a Year of Touch: The Journal of Healing, March 2010, pg. 17. Forthcoming in Private Practice by Maria Basile, The Lives You Touch Publications, Winter 2010-11.

*

Something Blue, Something New
~Ramona Bates

It’s two in the morning, the end of summer.
I greet you now, “How can I make you better?”
Your hand is cold, your face stained with tears,
Your voice trembles, you express your fears.

You tell me about Gina, Cathy, Brenda Lee
There are fifteen of you dressed splendidly.
Mimosas, margaritas; much more than a thimble
Partaken as you danced to the music, so nimble.

You tell me of the gold strap, bejeweled
Holding your shoe to your foot so tanned
As you stepped from the sidewalk.
Now you sob, unable to talk.

I clean blood, a dark red path away.
A sterile blue paper drape, I lay
Across your upper face
Tiny stitches pull your skin into place.

You tell me of your wedding dress
As your future husband caresses
Your hand, “It’s all right
Our future is bright.”

*

Untitled
~”A Bad Idea” Anastasia

Raised in conflict, of two minds
A child of God, the truth that binds
To heaven-
The creed passed down from times Nicene.
A child’s faith must come and pass.
For I have seen with my own eyes
The rings of Saturn, which to my surprise
Were yellow-
The purest yellow that I have seen.
There was naught in the tube but glass.
And I have tuned the radio dial
Turned towards the sky, the trial
A success-
The clouds that made the milky sheen
Were really, truly hydrogen gas.
I thank God I was lead astray-
Joined hands with Truth, and walked away.

More wonderful selections from the poetry contest:

What May Be Brought You, As One Dying
~Ruth F. Harrison

5 books of poems and a chocolate egg,
yellow flowers and water

pancakes with syrup and 10, 093 pills,
1, 093 summer fall spring mornings
on the road in your wheelchair:
blue chickory blossoms, a wild sunflower
77 picnics, your daily teeth, 4, 372 Depends
with accompanying fresh sheets. Crisp toast.

Your daughter may read aloud to you
what you have saved and written of your life;
you hear it as a pleasant sound, perhaps as events
passing, almost familiar, words voiced by a stranger

written about someone who doesn’t much
interest you. They may bring you poached eggs,
custard, clean hair, clean floors, may stand
inside the privacy of your bathroom, waiting.
A small child may teach you how to count
your fingers, a strange man may rub your ankles,
may whistle over the milk buckets on the porch.

That woman may rearrange your own kitchen
and hide your glasses and your other hat.
Someone will hand you a small dog and
take away your wedding-gift scissors. You

may be given wooden beads and fabric, a gray
kitten, the sounds of roosters crowing, a blue
jar-lid with WHIP WHIP WHIP repeating all
around it, a yellow cube with grouchy or sad faces,
a handmade calendar of very big days. Oh you

who gave so much, you must expect that some
of it, wanted or no, will now return to you.

*

What My Father Left (Me)
~Jordan Grumet

It wasn’t as
if the taste of things
had changed
Bitter fallow top
soil, the earth’s corrosive
bile
Death was still….
and life…ah
life
Sullied
by filial
infirmity…poisonous
umbilicus
And poor,
poor Achilles
bursting
nay exploding
in my
head

*

Dear Melody
by Rachel Swirsky

When we floated together in our mother’s womb,
I consumed you as one scared thing
will do to another in this lonely world.

My guru, David, says your soul is beautiful.
An artist’s soul. A dancer’s soul.
He pressed his face to my belly
& said he could see your aura
shimmering through my abdomen
lovely as a mirage.

I feel you when I sit in my organic co-op chopping kale
& dreaming about murals you’d have painted.
I feel you when I hear a homeless man melt joy
like rich warm caramel into his saxophone’s strains.
You beg me to slip off my moccasins
& dance barefoot on concrete.
It was you who wanted to dye my hair magenta,
wasn’t it?

Paris, my hypnotherapist, says understanding past sins
is the first step toward karmic equilibrium.
In her office behind the acupuncturist’s, she regressed me
back through memory’s folds to the time
when you and I embraced in our mother’s belly.

Yearning gaped in my essence
like the universe hungering for God.
The cells that were me transmitted that hunger
to the cells that were you
& your kind soul, your beautiful soul,
offered yourself to fill me.

I felt an echo of that hunger last night
as I lay with David on the beach
salt air lapping our skins, thighs pressed
into the timelessness of granite cliffs
worn by millennia into humble fragments of sand.
Gulls cawed, seals chorused, waves murmured,
the cosmos rumbling its approval.
David slipped his hand down my belly & tried to fill
my lingering emptiness.

Handless, tongueless, you took part as you could,
sending an egg with your DNA into my uterus
where David’s cells waited, ready to make
the child only we three could conceive.

For a moment as he filled me
as you filled me
I became one with the universe that is you & me & him
& kale & communes & murals & barking seals
him me you becoming
youhim
meyou
himmeyou
meyouhim
an endless recombinantion of souls & DNA
together miraculous
like clashing weather fronts birthing the wind.

Most people live forever terrified
the universe will abandon them
to the frozen pall of solitude.
I am so lucky to be twice filled
twice reassured I will never be alone.

Melody, I promise:
Our baby will learn
to paint & dance.

I’ve been reading through some fantastic poetry entered into the contest, and frankly I’m thrilled to see such thoughtful, artful, and eloquent writers out there.  With permission, I’m honored to share these poets’ words.  For the month of August I’ll be posting great poems as they roll in.  Here are three for today:

The Harvest
~C.L.Wilson

She talks to them; knows that
although the remnant quiver
of a working nervous system at the knife’s point
is not awareness but only life’s
most rudimentary reaction, still she turns
this residual life into death by her hand,
and this one death into six lives or ten,
or sight, or new bone and ligament,
a new blood type, new scars, new hopes.
They cannot hear or see, but perhaps they know
that their last cut was made with love,
their last gift remembered. Such a cut
can never wound, could never sting.

*

Pharmacology
~Jon Dean

Swallow Whole. Do Not Chew Or Crush.
Accept this directive unconditionally and
you will have your initiation to the unblooming –
it secrets revealed to you in the curling leaf,
the bashful twist of the morning glory’s skirts
rushing to hide her nakedness from Night.

TAKE ONE TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY EVENING
A mystery cult steeped deep in confusion awaits,
expectant of your religious devotion. Tarry at the altar
of your bathroom counter, and consider the seed.
Plant it. Allelochemical explosion to silence
the stomatal choir, singing the songs somatic.

This Drug May Impair The Ability To Drive Or Operate Machinery.
You will not be rejuvenated or renewed, but you will
awake, and that is a small victory. It is the seed’s gift
to you, a single stem in a yellow plastic bud vase.
Pollen is a soporific. Your blankets will become
integuments, and no one will fault you when they harden.

Use Care Until You Become Familiar With Its Effects.
There is a wonder in the diversity of the penultimate
form – some, once inflorescent, find themselves
syncarpous, others dry and flatten, a winged samara
catching the next breeze to swirl to distant fortune.
Incant to axiom: The flower must die in childbirth.

*

The Luminiferous Aether
~Chris Barrett

I.

She reaches across
me to turn
on the bedside lamp.

A cone of yellow light
knifes through the
darkness
and
I squint into it
as she answers
the phone.

It’s her mother.

II.

The flight east
is longer than I remember.

On such short notice
we were unable
to get seats
together.

She sits in the front
of the plane,
on the aisle,
listening to music
and
I’m in the back,
in a window seat,
watching
the sunlight skirr
along the cloud
tops.

III.

The sun is choked
by a knot of
gray clouds.

My wife, in
black, is stoic
against the
afternoon gloom.

Also in black,
her mother
weeps into
a balled tissue.

The sun emerges briefly,
illuminating the
polished teak of
the coffin.

A glint catches my
eye and I wince.

IV.

A lightning strike across
town triggers a power
outage.

A breeze whispers
through the
open window
of the guest
bedroom
and
extinguishes
a candle burning
on the table across
the room.

We are sheathed
in darkness.