Somehow, I know you woke up
right before you died—maybe a name
or some urgent gibberish on your lips,
organs like waiters jumping out windows
to escape a burning skyscraper.
But it'd been days. You'd called me
a sick asshole for not untangling you
from all those glass-clear tubes,
swung for my jaw between apologies,
chose Budweiser over free vaccines.
Then again, couldn't I have ignored
the nurses and bound myself to the couch
a casket-length past your drip pole?
Instead, I went back to the hotel
and watched something about goats
side-stepping up the faces of mountains,
as dumb and surefooted as angels,
so that I might forever be stuck
in that same ceramic slice of dawn
when you woke to a melting world
and called out, sure I’d answer.
Michael Meyerhofer's fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He has been the recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and other honors. His work has appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Hayden's Ferry, Gargoyle Magazine, River Styx, Missouri Review, and other journals. He is also the author of a fantasy series and the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit his website.