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.