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Tag: cancer

  • Contexting

    I took my leave because there’s nothing left to do. I thought I’d be more upset, saying goodbye for the last time and knowing it was finally, truly the last time. She moaned in agony. I patted her shoulder and left. I mumbled “I love you” on the way out. I thought I’ll be glad…

  • A Reader’s Purge: Binging on the Ruminations of Little Girls and Dying

    I’ve been crying since I was eight years old. Blame Lurlene McDaniel. I do. In the summer of 1987, I found death on a shelf at the Lee County Library in Sanford, North Carolina. I had been looking for those pre-teen romance novels, the ones where boys didn’t have naughty intentions and girls said no…

  • Tuesday

    Tuesday a day of extended anxiety “on” for the job “on” for my class and just for kicks when I’m tired enough to rest my head a phone call cancer is terminal again nothing the doctors can do six months twelve months lungsthyroidbonemarrowandmoremoremore cancer is a carnival worker smiling to my family, leering at them…

  • Trilogy of 10-line Poems

    Between Birth and Decay My aunt had cancer. Actually, she still does. It’s just rotting with her bones in an underground cavern. Between birth and decay, it’s the suffering that counts. Malinger away. Two other aunts have cancer now. Don’t they deserve it, never coming to visit never seeing the suffering until the end. More…

  • Killing My Mother(s)

    Am I going to kill my mother? My Aunt Ty died. Now, two other aunts on that same side of the family have cancer. These three aunts have at least one thing in common: they always swore that there’d been a mistake and I was their daughter. My aunts soon to be dead or already…

  • Rocks

    I didn’t put her away. I thought I would have. I thought I’d turned a corner. For six weeks, an envelope with pictures of my dead aunt have been on my coffee table, waiting for me to do something with them. I have gotten teary-eyed just seeing the envelope. The last week has been especially…

  • Dying a Death

    The last words I’ll ever hear her speak are, “I’ve still got fight left in me.” Or maybe, “I don’t have no fight left in me.” I distinctly heard “fight left in me.” I asked her how she was.  Dry: “I’m great.” Floated back into her morphine dreams or nightmares. Later, when I was alone…