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Hospital
Mother,
they carted you away
from the lobby
like a crate of bruised fruit,
and left you in intensive care
hunched over your tray,
playing solitaire,
stacking black on red,
red on black.
I am here, just barely
with the cancer that spread
from your left breast
like a rumor
and new veins
stuck into your wrists.
Lying on the hospital bed
that has borrowed you for three weeks,
your legs fossilized
against the light blue sheets,
your body's fifty-three years of tricks
pale inside your ironed blue gown.
Mother, the rosary
you taught me how to hold
is buried in the back of my dresser drawer,
tangled, static, cold.
-By David Jones
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