The Gift
What lasts longer than ink
or stone or a pond’s ripple?
I want to give you
the deepest green.
Memory circles back,
highways turn
to dirt, the dead blossom
in children’s voices.
Place this carnation in a vase.
Swallow these pills.
Don’t move, don’t speak.
Let me do this.
“The Gift” was first published in Brave Voices in January 2019.Many thanks to Audrey Bowers and her editorial staff for taking this piece.
O at the Edges 
Reading today takes me back to this month 2020, charged with administering my son’s multiple daily pill intakes. A challenge as doses and mix kept evolving, Daily updating my dosage chart that kept me from screwing up combinations, wanting to nickname each med some short tag but afraid to chance scoldings from Hospice. My son never questioned or resisted – swallowed whatever handed. He had bigger things to ponder.
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In my dad’s last years he took so many medications that my sister had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of them. Even then it was difficult. But he was incapable of doing so himself.
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