We joke about it: Mom has to go throw up when I talk about work. The one about the nine-year-old home alone, taking care of a dying baby hooked up to machines in a back room, who swallowed a bottle cap. The one about the morbidly obese old man in a collapsing trailer whose bloated feet teemed with maggots. The one about the drunk woman who kept wrecking property and cutting herself with glass who could never get over the loss of her baby. The one about the guy on meth with a hidden switchblade who got checked into ER only to stab another guy on meth strapped to a gurney in the same ER to death. Blood everywhere. Blood painted all over the clean white church of the hospital. The bureaucracy of giving a crazed patient a K bomb. The 20-year-old gang member shot 22 times, my daughter’s first intubation procedure she beams. The 94-year-old first of his kind Navy SEAL being jostled over high Vegas speed bumps who told her, It’s ok. I just wish I could dance with you.
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Sherry Abaldo splits her time between Las Vegas and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, The New York Times, Down East Magazine, Northern New England Review, and other literary journals and anthologies as well as on The History Channel and PBS. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California. A two-time Dibner Poetry Fellow, her awards include a Regional Emmy and winner of The Ekphrastic Review’s Erotic Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. Her website: sherryabaldo.com.
