on credit

eight weeks ago
when the phonecall came,
leanne was in her car,
in a parking lot
outside a department store.
i was in washington dc
teaching a workshop and listening
to people tell stories about, yes,
having cancer and a childhood friend drowning
and how to take care of bees
and a father who painted every leaf
green, by hand, on his dying bonsai tree
and a [...]

chemo, interrupted

so, i didn’t have chemo today …. my blood counts are too low, meaning that i haven’t recovered enough from the last dose to tolerate the next one safely. this is fairly common, especially with this aggressive treatment. so, danny and i spent 4 hours at the clinic today as they ran tests [...]

befour

we got to go.
so, yesterday, at the funeral service
the masons wore special aprons.
they put a sprig of evergreen on the casket.
the world war 2 veterans saluted.
and we said goodbye.
leanne read something,
then marla read something.
then i tried to read a letter
that lee’s dad wrote to his father.
he had asked me to read it
because he wouldn’t be [...]

a grocer

he owned grocery stores for most of his life.

he’d tell me about cutting meat behind the counter
or the boxes of produce,
or, after the race riots in baltimore in the 60s,
how his store was burned to the asphalt,
how he drove up days later to see it
and the only thing left on the lot
was a can of [...]

spoke

i told myself
not to wait
until some end
to remember.
i knew i’d forget all the little things.
every year on our anniversary leanne and i sit and have dinner
and think about one small thing from each year of our life together.
just a straw.
everytime we drive somewhere and leanne sees
a magpie, she says
“hello mr. magpie, howse mrs. magpie doing?”
and [...]

practice for what

while the prognosis has never been better,
lately, leanne hasn’t been able to get out of bed.
if she does, she walks around the house with the face of death,
the face of bone pain that reaches her jaw, her spine, everywhere.
it’s the neupogen.
or it’s the chemo.
it’s something, though.
the grind of making through every day is harder than [...]

tense

the other night
leanne and i talked about the story.
you know the one by now:
our story.
we didn’t talk about what had happened yesterday,
or the day we saw the petscan,
or really what we had seen,
or even what we have seen and heard and felt
over the past six weeks.
instead we talked about what we’ll talk about
later.
how we’ll sit [...]

when words fail

a novel is a life,
a short story a week,
a poem a second.
or at least they can be.
what we try to do
is just approximate,
to just make someone feel
as if they are there.
i try to do it with words,
and fail all the time.
jenna walker does it with photographs
and as far as i can tell, hardly ever fails.
(this [...]

paging dr. blogger

lee and i are, well, tickled that our oncologist,
dr. alex menter, reads our blog.
that he would write on it is even more astounding.
though since he popped the blogging cherry,
i feel compelled to respond to his comment
about the petscan results, about him sounding monotone
while delivering the best news we’ve heard in a long, long time,
about him [...]

halftime

so,
here we are again.
leanne is in the recliner,
lydia is on the couch,
leanne’s childhood friend jen, who left her husband, 18 month old and 6 week old,
just made us crab cakes.
today was chemo day #3.
halfway to the promised land
filled with the regrowth of hair and of our life.
we saw the doctor today.
without much fanfare, he showed [...]