Tag: dying

Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose by Kathy Nelson

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Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose

I’m no good at saying goodbye.
Not to the water aerobics ladies bobbing
in that cool blue—I give a vague wave
to no one in particular, hoisting myself

up the ladder. Not to the boss
who told me he wished he had five more
like me. Not to my aunt the last time
I saw her alive. I chirped See you later

as she cried, knowing I lied. My father
grew cold on the bathroom floor,
behind the locked door,
while my fingers fumbled the rotary dial,

the ambulance already too late,
the setting sun’s angles stretching
across a blank wall.
I was seventeen. It was December.

The low winter sun is what I recall.
My mother’s last hours, the other end
of my life, I thought I’d finally
learned how to say goodbye.

I even practiced the words
in that overheated room,
where her bones were already lifting
from her flesh, and on the sill

an electric fan whirred.
I droned on just like that fan,
thanking her for all she’d done for me,
promising I would always miss her.

It wasn’t Goodbye, all those words
I said. It was I’m innocent.
Maybe the first loss, the worst,
the biggest grief of all is innocence.

Truth is, when her breath ceased,
I was a helium balloon released.
When my friend, over an untouched lunch,
whispered her news, two kinds

of cancer, the diagnoses arriving
like twins. I felt it then—
the straining for escape, the wish
for a magic trick, like Teller’s

or Houdini’s, to overcome death.
Moving west at 70, explaining
the need to be closer to family,
I pretended I’m not dying too.

Doesn’t moving always have its appeal?
My Irish ancestors fled potato blight,
their sights on milk and honey.
Who, I wonder, did they leave behind?

A heart can grow wooden with loss,
like a creaky old wind-up clock
grinding its gears, a machine, chiming
on schedule and ticking, ticking.

I knew a man once whose daughter
would no longer see him
after he told her he was dying.
She’s not angry he told me.

She loves me. She’s young.
It’s too hard to bear.
I too tried forgetting my father.
Twenty years after the day

I didn’t save him, my life by then
a small room of locked doors,
I crept back, unraveled and
empty-handed, to the cemetery.

Among the green mounds,
I scoured the headstones for his name.
Will I leave this world with nothing
and no one left to lose, or will I

leave it the way I leave one room,
arrive in the next with no idea
what I came there for? My friend,
her cancer three months in remission,

climbed a stepstool, lost her balance,
fell. Three days later, she was dead.
Is that how I’ll leave? Or like
a thirteen-pound terrier mix,

witless and resolute, churning
his short legs up a mountainside,
chasing a half-ton moose, heeding
only instinct and the body’s will?

Or will I leave the way I left
that job, regretting almost
everything, wishing for someone
to call me back, beg me to stay?

*

Kathy Nelson lives on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She is a James Dickey Prize winner, a finalist for the Orison Best Spiritual Literature Prize in Poetry, an MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a Nevada Arts Council grant recipient. She is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in About Place Journal; Atlanta Review; Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art; New Ohio Review; Pedestal Magazine; Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review; Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

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Waiting for My Medicine

In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.

He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.

I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One, ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).

Mango Languages by John Arthur

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Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

Two Poems by Christina Daub

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People are Dying, But

I’m in my fifties when the officer informs me,
houses are for kissing, not parks and especially
not parks after dark, never mind that’s where
the moonlight and the stars hang out. She bores
her blinding headlights into us and barks,
are you clothed, why are your seats reclined,
what are you doing–we terrible criminals trying
to steal a little romance under Orion and Mars.
She demands to know where we live and why
we don’t go home, because houses are for kissing,
she repeats, as if I’d never thought I might kiss
you over the sink, or while paused in the doorway
handing you a book. Never mind the loveseat,
the corners, or the infamous nooks. As if I’d never
imagined the whole house being one big kisseria,
because that’s how it is when you’re in love
and want to kiss everywhere. But it’s a rough
night for the thin-lipped park policewoman
who looks like she hasn’t kissed in years, she
with the deadest beat, her short arm of the law
stretching only from her high beams to random
parked cars, as she makes her rounds in Rock Creek
Park, driving from playground to playground after dark.

*

Grief is like that

the plovers ticking this way and that, threading
the shore with their disappearing tracks,
the waves relentless, lulling, the wake
as temporary as our own wakes will be.

When they took your body away, the quarters
that weighed your eyes shut dropped
to the floor. No one wanted to touch them.

Cards stacked up by the hothouse flowers.
We’d held it together all day. Then the sky broke
open, and we were gutted like fish. Someone
brought over ice cream. I don’t remember who.

*

Christina Daub is a poet from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Stone Circle Review and others. She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

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I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.