Kristin Ryan
BEGINNING AND ENDING WITH A RECLINER
I.
I’m standing in my mother’s yellow kitchen,
studying the ripened avocadoes that we will
mash for my birthday celebration tomorrow.
I know you don’t want to hear this but
[…] is dying. Cancer. Hospice has been called.
He just sits in his recliner and stares out the window.
I swallow down my panic,
the bile, the feeling of his
fingernails and whiskers
across my skin as he rocks,
both of us rigid.
I take a sip of water.
Oh.
I try to shake the feeling
of bees swarming in
my limbs, my head.
I set the glass down
with a thud, water
sloshes over the rim.
II.
My friends wish him a slow, painful death.
I just want him gone.
That’s it.
The text comes as I’m thrashing
from a nightmare.
My phone falls off the couch,
and startles me awake.
[…] died this morning.
I close my eyes, wait for the relief.
It never comes. Instead, I throw up.
My jaw locks. I tremble for days with
a migraine so severe I’m left dry heaving.
I try to picture him in his last moments:
small, childlike, full of pain, and afraid,
just as I was, in that recliner,
pleading for it all to stop.