by Ann Hudson

You’re not dead yet. Not dying
in any urgent sense. Though some evenings
you are all urgency, your skin hot

and damp. It’s more than weather,
though it’s early summer, the gnats
fierce against the screens.

And who knows what your regimen
of pills induces. Mom calls this
agitation, and yes, you’re driven

to be in motion, more Bacchanalian rave
than a sure-footed dance, more
frenzied wildness around the fire,

except instead of footwork you’ve got
limbs churning in your wheelchair,
the parking brake on. And instead of fire

to dance around, you’ve got a growing emptiness
which I imagine as a whitening spreading
in your brain like ice. Or like tree limbs

that you only discover in summertime
are dead, persistently gray against
all the buzzy, feverish frenzy of green.

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Ann Hudson's first book, The Armillary Sphere, was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Rhino, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.