I find an unopened email from my oncologist, Kirby-Diaz,
in an account I sometimes go days without checking, a border
crossing between the realms of birth and death,
almost gibberish, its long garbled sentences ecstatic
because she could find no sand on my latest brain scan.
And she almost never gets to deliver good news:
how lucky I should feel I am!
In the dream, I am already composing a poem
out of this tapestry of disbelief. In the dream because oncologists
never send emails, good news or bad. In the dream because sand,
unlike FLAIR or enhancement, which sound like made-up terms,
is a made-up term. And because Kirby-Diaz is not the name
of my oncologist but my son's pediatrician.
Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. He was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in over 100 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, and South Dakota Review. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award.
Links to work online: