Poetry | January 08, 2024

Pink Feather Boa

 

She is pinching my son’s

small thumb and index finger

 

around the petals of a

buttercup, chanting

 

She loves me; she loves me not,

flecking them windward

 

over the row of graves

and onto the windshield.

 

We noticed her as we parked

facing this grassy corridor

 

through a sheen of haze,

a tall silhouette

 

kneeling to knot a balloon

to the potted plant beside

 

our daughter’s headstone—

the only care left to give

 

her patient. After we

revised the DNR form

 

and our daughter began hospice

our longest-tenured night nurse

 

never showed again. So Diane

shouldered the extra hours,

 

and later she stepped to the podium

wearing a pink feather boa

 

at our daughter’s funeral

to speak of the lightness

 

she felt when holding her.

She loves me; she loves me not,

 

crouching beside the headstone,

pulling a stray from our son’s cheek.

 

With the same motion she

reached for an oral syringe

 

he plucked off the drying rack while

she was laying out the evening meds.

 

He dangled it between his lips

as if it were a smoke, and

 

as he flings the next petal

she chuckles the way she did

 

when she closed the cabinet doors

my wife left ajar, slight shake

 

of her head, placing the Neurontin

next to the morphine on the counter.

 

And yes she did walk us

through the door of our daughter’s

 

last breath, held a stethoscope

to her chest and confirmed

 

her heart beat no longer.

And at two am, her tall shadow

 

thrown by sconces on the

walls outside our apartment

 

she walked away alone.

Our son gasps. He’s out of petals

 

and her laugh climbs into

a whooping peal. Tears

 

in her eyes as if she’s

drawing the morphine again

 

into a clean oral syringe

and like all good nurses

 

pressing it gently through the tube.