Do Not Resuscitate
Despite
the DNR,
nurses
did a full code
on
Passion –
one,
two, three, four, five, breathe, CPR, Tinder
one,
two, three, four, five, breathe, eHarmony.
It
wasn’t like TV.
Only
one out of twenty live.
I’d
imagined Passion, back arched, skin flushed,
the
veins in her neck prominent while she panted
open-mouth,
sweat beaded on her hairline,
temple,
and the small of her back, hand. Instead,
Passion
lay speechless and blind with a bag of piss
hanging
from the bed she hadn’t left in a decade.
My
visits – painful obligations.
I
wished the mortuary would turn her
into
a box of fine, gray ash
I
could store in the basement.
The
nurses’ heroic measures succeeded only
in
padding Passion’s medical bills.
A
funeral director guilt-tripped me into holding a service.
Only
the preacher’s platitudes attended
Jon Wesick
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com
Marvelous work.
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