A Hand to Hold

A nurse named Jeffrey who smelled of cigarettes, the one who wrapped his arms around me and tucked my face into his stubbly neck as the spike of lidocaine entered my spine, the one who peered nervously into my eyes after the shot of ephedrine jerked me back to consciousness, the one who moved in and out of view as doctors barked and rushed, as I felt the jumbling and tugging of my organs and saw my blood-washed baby girl rising out of me, spinning out and shivering...

That nurse Jeffrey winked at me as I emerged from drug-induced amnesia squeezing his hand. He said, "Everything goes better if you have a hand to hold, right?" Then all the doctors lost their straight faces, laugh lines appeared above their masks, and the room got warmer at my expense. I'll never know just what I did, but now I consciously ask for a hand and I have never been denied. 

© Laura Seale, 2013

Hold My Hand
Photo by Elizabeth Ann Colette
from Wikimedia Commons

Pieces of My Soul

carelessly strewn about

life’s sticky kitchen floor

unwanted

unrecognizable

moments of distant glory

forgotten triumphs

hollow victories

paragraphs and chapters

of once-read pulp fiction

mismatched socks and dirty underwear

not very neatly folded away

into endless bottom drawers

haunting relics 

stacked in barely lit crawl spaces

and cobwebby corners of the psyche

refuse of the soul

shattered and scattered

pieces of then

nervously awaiting

some gentle caretaker’s

healing broom

© Bill Vollrath, 2013

Pulp fiction cover
from Wikimedia commons

I-88

The long shadows of winter,

of bright, white birches;

their gnarled and arthritic fingers stroke the sky,

reaching for a sun that barely rises before it sets.

Other trees, gray and patient, stand waiting. 

Their gentle sway suggests no hurry.

They trust that new buds will come soon.

But the white birches have an anxious gleam.

Creeks are frozen into miniature glaciers –

rocks and fallen limbs scattered in silence,

like the limbs of drowning men.

In another season, the precocious creeks 

are kinetic in the still woods.

In another season, they are renewal,

carrying the tired and broken bits of these mountains away.

But even the creeks are silent.

Only the white birches refuse to accept the patience of winter.

Only the white birches reach for the coming spring.

© Jeff DeBellis, 2013

Birches in Winter
Photo by Axel Kristinsson
from Wikimedia Commons

I Sing the Body Politic; A Sestina for Election Day

I am discovering with trepidation

that no age is old enough to learn about

the fragility of the human body.

The ripple of ribs flowing under the oar

of a collarbone. Heart underneath, beating

lopsided. Like a bird with a fractured wing.

What does it matter that I live in a swing

state when I can barely discern a nation? 

My myopic mind’s eye... a system’s beating

pulse appears inconsequential to a bout

of arrythmia in my own red or-

gan. Does a vote cast extend my own body?

But I fill out my ballot. Sing the body

politic. Watch the neighbor woman’s child swing

her legs under the chair outside the booth. Or

maybe she was dancing the demarcation

between body;(s) and body;(pl). A quote about

choices ("Life is the sum of"- Camus)  beating

in my mind, I see her pink clad feet beating

Choice’s shroud one day; the weight of a body

reduced to moment.  Life's meaning now about

pen on paper. Four more years of her swinging

from this self definition; the duration

of plural breath. We are drowning in infor-

mation, but starved in knowledge. Stumbling left or

right hoping to choose wisely. Daily beating

down wisdom’s door in the itching temptation

to choose well. Make us proud of our one body.

To not be the one standing in the swinging

Door of truth forgetting what it’s all about.

Is it all about me;(s)? Or is it about

me;(pl)? Do I belong to myself? Any more

confusion and my profile might simply wing

into blue like asphalt lines off of beating

heat. Then I shall no longer be named body.

Just anybody. Call me Population.

And yet, something about the still-strong beating

carotid thrills. Or maybe it’s your body  

adjacent, winging me to denotation.  

     © Sarah Fletcher, 2013

Voting in the United States
Photo by Tom Arthur
from Wikimedia Commons