Embedded Files
Transfusion
by David Chorlton
Its dizzy at the crossroad: look
left, look right, here is traffic
falling through the air, here
a bruise speeding round the bend,
and from across the street
a fracture knowing the precise
place to land.
Now the lanes
are blocked. Life becomes
a detour. No plans are honored
beneath a wounded sun.
What to do, and who
to call?
Best to cancel the rest
of the day, leave the double
yellow lines for bad luck
from down the road, red lights
asking which way to go,
and spins to a stop
where a head wound asks
for urgent help.
But everything’s
under control. The transfusion
begins, of replacing memory
with sunlight through a tube.
David Chorlton is a European who calls Phoenix home. He lives near South Mountain and found that a great comfort when he was recovering from an accident. His newest book is “Poetry Mountain,” which contains much of what took his attention in his surroundings while getting better.
Is there Tequila in Heaven?
by Kat Hofland
There are no true calculations made in the face of death. Her pulse’s accelerated flutter was visible through the thin pallor of her neck. By the time she made it to hospice, her body was reduced to bones – the muscle-eating disease left her in an ascetic state she loathed, even if only because she didn’t choose it this time. I read her Mary Oliver poems and prayed the words penetrated the fog of the morphine. The room remained dark all day, but the music we played always varied in pace, and turned joyous when we snuck in a bottle of tequila; she enjoyed just a few sips of that magic elixir in the days before she died. There were three of us who sat vigil, who documented the process of her decay. We were semi-new to each other, and lucky to have others to bond to as the rest of the world kept on in its usual form. These are the traces of an unusual circumstance, the kind that can’t be conveyed in full, the kind that can only be held in the chest with the hope that over time the brutality will pass.
Kat Hofland is a writer based out of Phoenix, Arizona. She is a co-founder of Rinky Dink Press, and her work has been featured in Light, Little Somethings Press, Insight II, and High Shelf Press.
Hospice Care for the Homeless
by Derek Roof
I cared for a man
who’d shit himself in the night
he’d drunk his belly into a moon,
a knotted and cratered satellite
orbiting a spine—the kind
of dead, fat rock that only
a dead liver can make.
I cared for him—
washed his clothes, fed him,
checked on him when he shit
himself in the night.
I watched him—naked
the dead earth of him
breaking off—
walking, hobbling peaked stomps,
carrying himself to the shower,
holding that moon in his arms
because, though the dead
weight of it, pain of it,
crushes out his shit and piss,
chokes his lungs, that moon
is all the death of him.
His earth is hit and broken,
his gravity sorting out the pieces.
He clutches his death
because it’s more than him now. He’s
bones and it’s fluid. He’s loose skin
and it’s taut.
I looked him in his eyes,
but couldn’t hold it.
He said he didn’t need
anything, standing in the shower.
I can’t look at his belly
while he’s looking at me.
His genitals are black.
I turn away, get him some towels.
How can I tell you that I cared for him,
cared for his death, that I know
I’ve said dead, or death
too many times
in this poem
because I’m trying to say
my dad is dead. dead
the way the man who shit
himself is dead.
Same moon, stretched with death
though dad’s was smooth with thin
skin that could pop. Not bombarded,
calloused, like earth’s moon
who’d lived in the streets.
I cared for him.
I knew his dead body.
I had held my hand on its chest
bones to feel its not-breathing.
I put the towels on the shower chair,
told him I’d burned his death,
mouthed along with prayers,
for his ash,
imagining there’s a heaven
for him and everyone else.
Shower spray drowned out my words.
I stood outside the curtain
and listened for a fall.
Derik Roof studied poetry at Arizona State University and works in Human Services, primarily serving the unhoused and recently housed out of chronic homelessness. He taught Poetry to incarcerated individuals at Arizona Department of Corrections, Florence, South Unit, as part of the ASU Prison Education Project, for two and half years, before COVID prevented entry into the prisons. He has served as poetry editor for Iron City Magazine which primarily publishes the work of incarcerated individuals. More of Derik’s work can be found in the upcoming issue of The Oakland Review, as well as previous issues of Four Chambers and Write on Downtown.
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