The news is good, I say,
when she asks me how it went,
my mother’s face soft as sand
touched by wind, the drugs
like an air she’s drifting on.
I hold a straw to her lips.
And later I watch her attempt,
in her confusion, to sip
from the little reed of the IV
needled in her wrist.
I’m so thirsty, she says
when I take her searching hand.
She asks and I tell her
a second time, The news is good—
I bring good news, I say,
like some repeating angel.
She keeps trying to push away sleep,
brushing it like desert dust
from her fingertips.
The news is good, I say again.
She won’t remember this—
not my voice feather-quiet,
nurses shuffling in the distance,
not the way I stand beside her bed,
haloed by the fluorescence
of the hospital room,
its green, prophetic glow.

 

 

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Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU). Her third book of nonfiction, Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity (New Mexico), is forthcoming in 2023. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.