Contributor: Ruth Z Deming

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I hope this last day of November
finds you well
Once the body learns how to make
cancer cells, her oncologist told her,
they look for hidden opportunities.
There’s no going back.
Like a child learning to read.

If only the abnormal cells were on the surface
we could pick them off, or take
an X-Acto Blade in the dead of night
Worry-Time, and slice them off
like bits of dried egg
under the reading lamp.

Nothing distracts like shopping,
America’s most perfect sport.
Only yesterday I went to Marshall’s
whispering “You’re looking not buying.
You’re looking not buying.”

When I came home I faced
my mortality once again. The new
credit card – the security code
reads “888” - expires in four years,
just in time for my seventy-second
birthday.

The words look hideous to me
but some day I’ll count that “young.”
Does it ever cross your mind,
as it does mine, from dawn to dusk
that some day they’ll all be dead.
Every last one of them,
wept for,
buried, cremated, bodies given to science,
as a new generation begins the rhyme all
over again.

Come with me and stand by the window.
The leaves on the maple are withered and shrunk,
dangling like dry tea bags, ready to drop.
Swirls of branches I never noticed
quiver in the cold. They loop round
creating a vacuum in the sky
were I a painter I’d splash it
onto a canvas. I knew a sculptor
once, who said a sculpture is
a tree in disguise.
The cancer that killed him
was in his stomach.

I have peeked out my window
once again.
Is it fair to say
the leaves are waving to me?
They are. They are.
Thing is,
are they waving hello
or goodbye?


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Ruth Z Deming has had her poetry published in lit mags including Mad Swirl, Eunoia Review, and River Poets.