Three Poems
Toast
Hunger sends us seeking its cheap white thickness,
forces us to leave her, two days old, incubated
in neonatal and stand in the parents’ kitchen.
Fluorescent lit, pokey, we embrace the closest thing
to home, busy ourselves separating slices, re-washing
plates. I take two squares of butter from the fridge,
warm their foil corners in my fists. Fear rolls in my shrunken
gut, watching you, wanting our sad mouths to kiss.
You spread, cut and pass me a golden triangle,
the oily joy of it leaking onto fingers. We suck it down
into machinery that made her, wondering where the fault is.
Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly
Her heart uncurled,
unfolded into four
but was clover
with an unlucky lobe,
the rarest of anomalies
that flourished to defeat her.
Room in a Hospital
No tabloids, no vending cups, no debris
of the bored and hungry. Instead
carpet, fireplace, neat homely items.
This is not the room where you wait for news,
this is the room where you are told it.
At the coffee table, the doctor hunches
to draw a heart. It needs time from his pen,
crossings out and a white space
where the valve won’t meet.
The heart is thirty six hours old and hers.
Perched on cool leather, we puzzle the sketch,
my husband takes his glasses off to cry.
Our daughter warrants a new vocabulary,
we are struggling to learn it.
Rebecca Goss's first full length collection is due with Flambard Press in 2010.