Order of Operations
First Tuesday of every month for six,
I drive you to the hospital.
You like riding high in my truck,
seeing everything, even as your legs,
skeletal parentheses in denim,
might not make the step up
after this latest round of chemotherapy.
Outside your house, I wait on your porch.
Always prompt, you appear at the door,
corners of your mouth accented with dried saliva,
math textbook tucked tightly under your arm,
the laminate peeling back from the edges,
no pocketbook, no cardigan
draped over your arm.
I suspect you know its precise dimensions
and calculated its weight
in proportion to your featherweight frame.
Inside the treatment room,
Rosen’s Discrete Mathematics Teacher’s Edition
holds your attention.
Perhaps, there is comfort in the familiarity–
brackets, square roots, variables,
old friends to polynomials, a fleeting balm,
one last attempt to solve,
the calculus of cancer.
Last night, on the eve of your final treatment,
I think about how I cried over the same tattered text
and endless algebraic equations,
sitting at your kitchen table, mind wandering,
wishing your oatmeal cookies
would somehow make the numbers make sense.
Now, abstract calculations take your mind away
from the discrete pain of the needle
and the drip that kills as it sustains.
Among the Hemlocks
Among the hemlocks,
on the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack,
a thick-pelted mink scampers
up and over lichen-coated granite
left dry on the banks,
just out of aqueous reach.
I marvel at her slinky deftness,
her effortless, oily movement among the stones,
her back flexing to match the gentle waves,
rippling astride her hop-dive-curl-stretch:
lovely syncopation in walnut brown.
Then, finally, in mid hop-curl,
she is gone.
My father has made it halfway down
the steep stone steps
that lead to the water’s edge.
From there, I take his hand
and help brace his body,
so fragile now I barely feel
its weight against my arm.
I take care he does not misstep—
a fall would surely mean a break,
the final hobbling of an already
failing frame.
Together, we reach level ground and pause.
We talk about the great blue heron
seen from the window early this morning–
how enormous they must be to take up
so much of the pane at a glance—
and at that distance!
I tell him of the wooly mink,
long and sleek and blink-swift.
My father says little—
A manifestation of his condition,
his neurologist tells me.
But I suspect he is thinking
about the mink with envy
as I offer my arm for ascension.
Philip A. Lisi lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he teaches English at his high school alma mater by day and writes poetry and flash fiction by night alongside his family and the ghost of their cantankerous Wichienmaat cat, Sela. His work has appeared in Sparks of Calliope, The Abbey Review, Litbreak Magazine, Rosette Maleficarum, and the Serious Flash Fiction anthology.
Sparks of Calliope 