by Sherry Stuart Berman

for S.                                                                                      

All summer, on the news,
citrus-colored skies. Tiny suns
like Red Hots I could pop

in my mouth. Beautiful dust.
Deluge. My patient’s father texts me:
She’s intubated after using drugs

again, and he’ll send me a check.
How often had she said disease and
wish, smoothed her bangs

with the ringed fingers
of both hands. When I call him,
I’m skimming—as in, hard to know

or meant to find. I’m not a star,
right now, boiling an egg
is beyond me. A fork falls

and for hours I don’t notice
how blood frames my toenail.
Some days

the Amazon gods 
leave poetry
on my doorstep. Hulu

and its mock heaven.
I tunnel back
to her chair, finally

stop drinking.
She won’t make it this time.
I’m a mother and scared

to feed my son. I talk to myself
in every room. How else
to admit failure?

Trauma-bodies; pain-
bodies: I pick their hearts
out one by one, lose

my place by the end
of a session.
Intimacy that’s not.

I save a dead woman’s text.
My son needs a feast and I
don’t. I don’t.

Maybe ghosts aren’t real
but I heard a sigh in that room,
turned and said, what?

I have this child and I had this love
and I could not see her through.

______________________________________________________________________

Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. Originally from South Florida, she is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.