Months To Years

Guilty Verdict

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:57:17 +0000

In April 2020, nursing homes, hospitals, and funeral homes in the county where I was coroner were struggling: what to do with the bodies of COVID-19 victims? I was in panic mode myself: my county had refused for decades to provide the coroner’s office with a morgue, settling for the odd free space in local […]

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Sorrow Through Facebook

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:47:45 +0000

Clemmie died last year in a car accident, only thirty-five years old. When I read about her death, it made me sad. When I saw how she was remembered, I was also angry. She had been a student of mine, during the Obama days, glory days for a long-time liberal like me. I was her […]

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Two Funerals This Week

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:35:49 +0000

On my way to a third, I come across a corpse on the road. Give rest, O Christ Eyes wide, tongue hanging, guts sprawled like a purse upended. to thy servant with thy saints I lift the dead from the gravel where sorrow and pain are no more place her on the verge, apologize for […]

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The Color in Pain (Series)

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:24:16 +0000

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Doctor’s Orders

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:16:44 +0000

For this doctor’s appointment you put on a suit. You were ready for the good news. It had to be. After all, Dr. Smith told us that you would beat it. You sat there in the chair like a school boy so eager to receive that passing grade. Buoyant, as if the small examination room […]

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There Is No ‘After Cancer’

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:57:45 +0000

There’s life before…and now. And they are very different indeed. I arrive at 8:10 for my 8:30am appointment. I finally look up at the familiar glass entrance, after walking in a confused circle for more than a block, despite having been at this very place more than once before. I am distracted enough that I […]

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Rule of Thumb

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:34:29 +0000

We thought we might lose her after a bad night and a switch to liquid morphine but she bounces back and wants a sandwich— no, not a sandwich, she says. She agrees to Rice Krispies but won’t open her mouth when I offer the spoon. Not Rice Krispies. What is it I want? Soup no, […]

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Taking a Stand

renatak — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:24:15 +0000

It’s my first time riding a Baltimore city bus. At the fifth stop on York Road an elderly man deposits his fare. I notice his zipper is down. My eyes widen. I’m not comfortable with cities or buses or dirty old men. As he shuffles closer, I realize there’s a catheter running out of his […]

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When the Ascent is Over

renatak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:58:18 +0000

The rib cage can function as a ladder in the tradition of Chinese medicine. Each intercostal space the foothold for the soul to rise up on its journey of progression to leaving the body when the work of the climb is complete, when the ascent is over. I think about this silently as I examine […]

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Sarajevo

renatak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:45:32 +0000

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Light at the Threshold

renatak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:32:32 +0000

I understand now why you were glowing your smile a beacon on the threshold of death. A light held up in the silence of words you could no longer speak. No cancer or lingering concern could darken your soft expression. All the lines had gone from your face. All I could do was to sit […]

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Peonies

renatak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:02:46 +0000

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In the Child’s Pose

renatak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 19:51:55 +0000

I’m curled on the floor of my bedroom in my parents’ house in Petaling Jaya. There’s a strip of floor between the bed and my mother’s antique Chinese cupboard—just enough space to open the cupboard door. Just enough for me to curl up on the parquet floor. The pillows are on the floor, along with […]

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The Forest

renatak — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:25:47 +0000

Even after sharing what could be good news, the doctor still clarifies. “Your husband is not out of the woods yet,” he says. “He is in the woods. Deep, deep in the woods. All he can see are the trees.” I look at you then, lying in your hospital bed, sheets like snow—crisp, clean, cold. […]

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The Corpus Callosum is Unremarkable

renatak — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:18:00 +0000

—An In-titled Poem1 …or, rather, there are no lesions there, unlike in other, special areas (a.k.a., the temporal or parietal lobes), so this particular note isn’t meant to be an insult… Still, the MRI result’s essential premise misses the entire point about his brain: thus, it’s not a small slap to his persona, nor to […]

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thief

renatak — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:06:52 +0000

I won’t write of aberrant blood cellls multiiplying squeeziing iinto allavaiiillabllespace only of upstairs echoes numb place beside me in the dark in the waiting empty seat a table setting unset upright recliner by mine the dog still lying beside the front door

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Goldfish

renatak — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:57:16 +0000

I pack extra silver linings like snacks for hungry toddlers who did not, could not know at the feast of my prognosis there would be no finger food.

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It’s What You Do

renatak — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:33:03 +0000

On Monday morning, exactly one week after my father died, Ruth knocked on our door. Though uninvited and unexpected, she was confident of her welcome. Ruth was my best friend’s mother. Mom invited her in. It’s what you do. Typically, Mom would offer a visitor coffee, or, had it been later in the day, a […]

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There’s No Place

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:31:34 +0000

Mom and Dad’s house, a two-story white farmhouse with a wide front porch, sat on four and a half acres with some trees, a couple barns, and a garage. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, the one whose name is in the front of the box of antique books I just went through. This place […]

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Bath

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:18:50 +0000

Be careful; wring it tightly in the tub and lather. Face the back, those ribs and spine, like beams that fail to taut a flaccid hide. And hold the hand when senile tears combine with ancient folds I crimped in stormy youth as gurgling creeks impressed upon that veil. But now, I care for you. […]

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Eating Anything You Want Until You’re a Hundred

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:09:54 +0000

Even though she was in her nineties, I thought my mother should give up eating frozen cream puffs and chocolate éclairs. But she seldom took my advice. At barely ninety-six pounds and with a relatively strong body, she took the advice of a doctor who said at her age she could eat anything she wanted. […]

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The Hand Whisper

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:54:18 +0000

dawn is worse the years pass one by two on my side I wait for its return a hand whisper as her breath haunts my nape’s chilled hairs my heart remembers that curved arm kiss warming up sleeping skin the way she made air move how it crossed over like a glider finding home I […]

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Alone and Surrounded

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:48:05 +0000

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Breathless

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:40:27 +0000

Breathless, Maria calls my name. We’ve known each other for twenty-five years. Even so, her pressured speech is hard for me to follow. When I turn towards her, she slows down. “Doctora, Doctora por favor I need to talk with you now.” All those discussions about the differences between doctors and nurse practitioners, and she […]

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My Last Eclipse

renatak — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:21:49 +0000

It’s probably just the way the trees cast awkward shadows in the strange diminished light, but if we’re talking totality, this was my last eclipse. The short run of this much-hyped celestial show is over, and any repeat or revival is thirty years or so away, but even as the curtain closed and the wild […]

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How Do You Get Through It?

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 23:05:48 +0000

“How did you get through it?” I’d ask adoptive parents-to-be. This was a question that I, as a social worker, asked over and over and over again. Whatever or whomever parents do/use/lean on in hard times may be needed again when they had a child placed in their home. I would remind them of the […]

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Looking for Blackberries

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 22:55:01 +0000

We ran to the trellises, ready to hand-rake the bushes For our bounty of ripened fruit, a half hour till Closing. So many tart, magenta berries in early July. No breeze. We needed the loamy smell of the farm, To be small as we faced its panoramas, as we Walked into the whir of its […]

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Olympic Champion

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 22:30:48 +0000

The tremor starts not as a temblor, Not even as an autumn rustling of leaves. It starts as a butterfly rising, fluttering— As the briefest gesture of wings. So Quickly it vanishes, repeats with longer Visits—these can linger for years— Until the flutter is expelled By the pummel of a one-two punch, Then punch after […]

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Child’s Violin

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:56:55 +0000

Their names had been excised, plucked away Without sound, then flipped into the fog, Joining that haze of songs she could no longer Retrieve. Yet she rose and applauded the instant She spotted her children and grandchildren At the door, her granddaughter dangling the ebony Case that held her half-size violin. As always, The grandmother […]

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Words My Mother Taught Me

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:42:02 +0000

Peplum, empire, epaulet, portrait collar. My mother taught me that features of fashion had names. Her wardrobe was carefully curated, and it reflected her contradictions: traditional but also trendy with a certain creativity. My parents shared a modest-sized walk-in closet. My father’s clothing was stored on the same side as his writing hand, on the […]

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An Orange Tree in Marrekech

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 21:13:16 +0000

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Things of My Mother’s that Disappeared After She Died

renatak — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 20:55:28 +0000

Photos from her childhood. I don’t recall ever seeing photos of her as a baby, or as a girl growing up in North Toronto with her mom and two brothers. Did I look like her? Her family had no pictures of her Chinese immigrant father who died when she was a toddler. No one ever […]

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