Life Is Tough

          For Patricia

Outside, a late-summer rainstorm
makes a marsh of the block
while the little neighborhood gods,
nine, maybe ten years old,
ride their skateboards
through the flooded streets.
Still wearing the Fall-Risk bracelet
attached at the hospital,
my own half-dead legs make me
more cautious than usual.
I want to yell through the window
and warn those kids
of the thousand dangers that lurk
beneath the surface—
ringworm, E. Coli, the little pebbles
that grab wheels and throw riders.

Convalescing at my mom’s,
it’s strange to be back in this house
where I was raised—
Same distant mountain, same begonias,
this one window-frame of world to inhabit.
Skeletal and aphasic,
I walker my way from bathroom to bed,
the hallway hung with cross-stitched
affirmations cheering me on—
Hope Is All You Need;
Life Is Tough, But So Are You;
Dream Big, Work Hard—
But like hell.
The little wheels
bark to a halt–
The gods fall.
Freezing, they slosh home
to their mothers.

*

Memento

Who could fault you
for losing the way.
For as long as the dead
have risen and walked
the righteous have been
mistaking incisions
for wounds.

*

Martin Vest’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Slipstream, Salamander, The New York Quarterly, Spillway, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the high desert of Eastern Idaho.