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An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine Main Menu Foreword Introduction At the Teaching Hospital by Dan Kraines Atrophy by Paul Blom Barnacled to the Bone by Stephen C. Middleton Biopsy by Julie Rosenzweig Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes Choke by Alyson Miller Dead See Scroll by Rich Murphy Deciding Not to Wear Glasses by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Discovery: Negative Return by Tara Skurtu Exile by Lane Falcon Flush by Stephen Mead Fruit By Tyler Chadwick Grandmother Dead, Then Alive, Then Dead Again by Matthew Baker Hysteria by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Lack by Sarah Anderson Wood Mirena by Meagan Grant Mittelschmerz by Sarah Kersey Moon Child by Lisa Hiton pecan, rodef, clam by Susan Comninos Refugees by Walt Peterson She Cannot Let Him Go by Nancy Smiler Levinson Some Days Begin Like This by Tara Skurtu The Mechanics of Love by Victoria Gatehouse The Needle by Isla McKetta There Was Beauty in That Graph by Geralyn Pinto [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller Contributors

If Not Absolution

18022
by Matthew Baker

 
 
When I pureed the food
to go into my grandma’s stomach tube,
I was oblivious.
TV tuned to daytime news as it always was—
her head shaking at inner city crime, nodding
at how the poor and homeless blighted the streets.
She never complained in front of me,
even as I watched the mush I’d made
slowly empty through the plastic into her body.
 
But then she became this broken, half-live doll:
the nurse lifting her arm
to work the joints, rotating her shoulders
to loosen up the sockets, ventriloquizing her
to the doctor who asked,
Where does it hurt today, missy?
 
Her hurt was everywhere,
and couldn’t they realize that?
She could no longer walk or stand.
Her skin bruised from IVs threaded to her veins.
The ventilator replaced her voice with its dactylic purr—
SHHHHHHpum           pum, SHHHHHHpum           pum.
She could not articulate
what last respects she felt due
for her difficult life well-lived:
 
her bridge club, her jewels, her fortitude
against the burning crosses on her Irish-Catholic lawn,
that high-class gaze,
that Jim Crow upturned nose—
powdered pure talcum—,
the tumbler drained and filled each afternoon
and through the night
with ease, the charity she talked about
but seldom gave.
 
Maybe what deserves respect instead
is how she accepted herself
without excuse.
 
Though what is dying
if not absolution? Or,
if not that, a softening, then muting,
one voice fewer in the din.

 

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