Waiting to Taste the First Salt
A pacemaker
clocked out
her days. Two doctors
had removed her gall
bladder, and left
ninety-four years
of stored bile. She’d cling
till the bitter end,
we figured,
waiting shamefaced
for the acidic
aftertaste
of her words that spread
like scars
to settle and dissolve.
In her cobwebbed voice,
she said
she wouldn’t make it
and no one held her hand.
What little strength
we had. Her body wasted
with fever
and vomit.
Her back clenched,
bladder flattened. Death put on
her polyester gown,
her sparse body silenced
to a star of fragile bones.
Is Empty He Says
Every two weeks I ache
in his conversations his breakable
stories his word-spelling the useless sticky
ways he repeats what he knew
and then his numbers
incomplete but ticking how
they enchant and pass
through many times
I stood I stand
by the toaster and listen
to the smell of his blinkings
his voice still
music and the clear echoing
and the cup empties and the cup
is empty he says goodbye
eight ways says he is guided and I am full
of the last line next word the scorch
of fortune his unhappy leanings
and then he transposes nouns the days
narrow not belonging and I listen but know
nothing the phone line dead
Lauren’s third book, One Hundred Hungers, won the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2016). She is a 2015-2018 Black Earth Institute Fellow and the producer/host ofAudio Saucepan on Santa Fe Public Radio. More at www.laurencamp.com.