Tag: Sherry Abaldo

I haven’t heard a bird in months by Sherry Abaldo

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I haven’t heard a bird in months

and I wonder if I’m going crazy or
all this really is a simulation or
World War III already started
like my slumming source of news says

or if this is just the desert way, things
busy eating other things, napping with
their exorcist heads backwards, hunting
shade or water beyond human footfalls

I heard a screech at dawn last week
that sounded like a murder in the live oak
trees, or maybe mating – grackles? feral
cats? elephant tranquilizer OD?

finally on a walk I spot a hummingbird,
slim beak deep in the neighbor’s red
lantana, her body greenly iridescent, all
suburban Vegas flash, a fish with wings

*

Sherry Abaldo currently lives with her husband in Las Vegas. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART, Rattle, The Eunoia Review, and many other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Sequestrum and The Mackinaw. More at www.sherryabaldo.com.

EMT by Sherry Abaldo

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EMT
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.