by Denise Duhamel

I record my mom singing “A Bushel And A Peck”
and send it to my nieces to play for their boys
who are all under 12, the age they need to be
to visit her in the ICU. My mom has a bandage
on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,
and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils. Blue
veins squiggle her forehead as though her youngest
great-grandson has scribbled there. The boys
barely notice and send back their own videos—
Ben, Nick, and Max say, “We love you!”
then their mother pans over to the dog,
“And Ringo does too!” Zach, Brody, and Alex
sing “You Are My Sunshine.” My mom
always hated our cell phones, the way they
distracted us away from her. But now she wants
me to hold my screen so she can see, so she can hear
the boys’ song over and over again, her head
gently bopping back and forth on her pillow.

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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

by Denise Duhamel

You died the day the first unripe squash sprouts 

curled from the garden. You’d grown weak, 

couldn’t make a fist to hold the lilies. They dropped 

to the floor, a bouquet of dream-teeth 

loosened from the gums. The morphine drip 

helped you forget your prince who had passed 

a few years before. The green 

hospital gown was a misnomer—how inelegant.  

How unready you were for your final social occasion, 

your tiny cracked feet in those floppy rubber slippers.

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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). She and Julie Marie Wade co-authored TheUnrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.