Family Portrait as Hospice Bed

I’ll be the last numb rub your body knows,
what left your worn hips sore from fits: my dearth
of stuff and springs gone stiff with rust. Don’t leave
like geese in flight, autumn’s stalk of burning pine.
You try to rise, I hold you down. My sheets,
too tight, still beg for you to fill their space
with your breathing and bile and drooled remains
of our ending, stuttered life: I, I, I,—
am selfish for you. I don’t call the night
nurse when bad dreams take hold: Your father
sprawled limp atop where your foot rests on mine,
(I still love the times we numbly touch.)
like he’d lain in foreign dirt, corpse
pocked red as snow trampled by bleeding deer
your bullets skimmed as they fled into woods
behind this home you built. My comfort,
anemic, sinks to hold your body’s weight.
(What am I but the ground your blood will blush?)
For days, my stubborn frame has propped you up,
lifted your head to see logs you’d chopped, piled
unburned outside, made myself presentable
for grandkids’ glares, concealed my clinical
drear beneath pillows stuffed with balsam fir
you gathered on a trip, a quilt that draped
some former bed, as if I weren’t here.
How did they feel, these levitating days?
You say my comfort leaves you stuck, yearning
for libraries, for wars, for flight: Some life—
outside, geese rise—hurts least when quickly lost.

Thomas Renjilian is originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Thrush, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California, where he is a Dornsife Fellow.