Tuesday Morning
On Tuesday morning on my way to work
I slipped and fell between two subway cars
while trying to avoid the smells and groping.
Everyone on board heard the screeching
wheels as it braked and torqued and buckled.
I overheard the engineer’s muffled chatter,
telling headquarters what exactly was the matter
as I lay shoehorned in between the rails
beneath the massive chassis, white-knuckled, hoping,
as the great behemoth’s underside slid
slowly over me, gouging my forehead,
flaying my palms, and leaving rust flakes in my eyelashes.
Suddenly at sea, submerged, I swam
beneath my Leviathan, touching my forehead to her
as I suckled, safe in the water, her calf,
her only daughter. I breached with whale-song and splashes.
I awoke in heaven, or someplace like it.
It was so beautiful, and everyone
was beautiful. My mother said, “Hold on.”
She looked so young. “Don’t come,” she said. “Don’t come.”
On Wednesday I was in the morning papers.
On Thursday I was back at work and coping.
To be honest, the weekend was lost in bars.
And Tuesday I slipped between two subway cars.
Rubaiyat Written in the Hospital Waiting Room
In the waiting room of a famous cancer
hospital in New York, a man
is sleeping, head back, mouth agape,
his wife’s bag beside him on the cream and tan damask.
He seems to be the only one asleep.
With a direct view of a large, tranquil seascape
on the far wall, perhaps he dreams
of fishing in Barbuda, or some other escape.
At least in here, thank god, there are no screams.
It’s quiet as a library, or the gentle rains
that come in late summer. People talk softly
or not at all, lost in their thoughts and daydreams.
An older woman in a persimmon sari
with green-apple edging sits surrounded by family,
standing in blue jeans or suits; only one is weeping –
I know what she’s thinking, “If only, if only…”
Old friends, two women are speaking.
Someone from Housekeeping is busy sweeping.
A thin young woman I’ve seen before, barely
out of her teens, looks thinner. She’s disappearing.
And what of me? Yes, that’s me over there,
beneath the painting, reporting on how this lottery is unfair:
a life suspended, neither in nor out, nothing nor all –
all while awaiting a turn in the chemo chair.
When I was small the Ouija Board foretold I’d fall
and die at thirty-one, but then, oh well…
Now, like all of us here, my every “then”
is forestalled, as we listen, always, for the Reaper’s footfall.
M. Brooke Wiese has published most recently in The Road Not Taken, Sparks of Calliope, The Chained Muse, and Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review. Her chapbook has been accepted by Finishing Line Press, and her sonnets have been taught by poet Billy Collins to his college students.
Sparks of Calliope 