Because I am always doing
something like washing dishes
when I get one of those calls,
my mother saying the chemo
is making him sick. And if
I am in the kitchen, leaned
over the bowl, I can disappear
from the telephone and live
the life of the goldfish,
endlessly circling the same
swaying plant. And one day,
when the phone will ring again,
maybe I’ll learn what secret
they told the little scuba diver
that made him forever exhale
a gasp of disbelief.
©
is a Hackney Award winner whose work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, storySouth, Diagram, and elsewhere. Currently, he is on the editorial board of Southern Women’s Review, and plans to enter a doctoral program in English. He lives in Birmingham, AL.
