Falling Down
My daughter can’t breathe
she sits
on a green chair
a privilege of the most dire.
Blue chairs can sit for hours
there, one man has a spider in his ear
trapped in bitten, swollen flesh
but still crawling.
A carpenter who sawed off all his fingers
waits next to us
beside the soccer player
with a blood-soaked towel
pressed to her ear.
They’ll come up with new names
as carpenter and soccer player no longer apply.
If you feel sorry for yourself
go to emerg.
A girl with bad blood work
looks like a perfect china doll
but she is the sickest of them all
she will go to the city from here.
She has bad veins
they poke again and again
it’s her mother’s face
that makes me cry.
My daughter applies a mask
steam pours in her mouth
to coax open
her bloody-minded lungs.
An old woman lies on a gurney
“all she did was fall down,”
my girl says,
“why did she call an ambulance for that?”
“falling down,”
I say,
“can become
falling down dead.”
A woman says good-bye to her husband
he wheels into the O.R.
they sob and clutch at each other
then she walks out alone.
we walk together into the night
a figure stares at us, motionless
from the forest edge
his face a moonlike mask
between the living
and the dead.
Previously published by Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Edition 72, Volume 1, January 2020.
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