Page 16 - WTP Vol.VII #3

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the monthly swing away. Such dangling: our gone beloveds, as near as moons.
Turritopsis dohrnii
In a tenth-floor hospital room, my father survives surgery with scars, the tang of residual fear, and green Jell-O.
The besieged brain chugs along, the scalp peeled open, shunt placed, cancer given marching orders to the abdomen.
His wife leans in, and he thinks she is propositioning for sex, he with half a head of hair, glued together like Mary Shelley’s creature, his three children present in the room.
Uncertain acrobats, we tightrope between existing and living, the patient with a new cane and an incomplete grasp of gravity, the rest of us sinking under too much of it, jealous of his morphine, of the wishful thinking he floats in.
At the bedside, my brother reads aloud how some jellyfish
are immortal, the medusa transforming, first the deterioration of the bell, then the tentacles, cells transdifferentiating,
bypassing death. But who would want to suffer constant regeneration? The wounded head, the dark internal drip of cells. When should be the end of such continuing?
Supermoon
When the full moon coincided with its closest advance on Earth,
light broke into the living room, soaking the floor with moon.
Bigger and brighter, this perigee, washing out the Perseids.
My brother comes toward me
on the deck of a summer party and—
trick of evening light, flick of what the heart wants—our father is there.
We look, but we don’t see. Then there’s lunar apogee,
rebecca olaNDer