Katrina Kaye

While I was waiting for my coffee to cool,
they were slicing the black cells from your body.
Soft flesh of belly parted with scalpel’s precise kiss.

How easy it is to ignore mortality
when it is wrapped in fine paper,
but when covering is ripped and
intricacies exposed, life becomes a fragile thing.

While I was measuring my breakfast
and fretting my figure,
you began to hemorrhage,

blood upon blood

a shifting,

a splitting,

so unexpected.

While I was exchanging one shirt for another
the surgeon was uncovering the extensiveness of
your body’s abduction. No longer centralized,

it was spreading, and you,
you were bleeding.

While I was dreading the drive to work,
they were sewing you up,

staple and glue,

and king’s horses,

fit you back together.
Scarred and torn but clinging steady.

I was held back by missed phone calls,
and the disposal of junk mail, my fear of hospitals,
the procrastination of unsustainable reasoning
as I tried so desperately to pretend everything was normal.

I arrived late.

Too late to hold your hand when they put you under,
too late to be at your bedside when you roused.
I was not there when the doctor told you what they found
and you were left alone to stare out

a parking lot facing window

with the news of mortality

rippling through your mind.

“Late” is previously published in Progenitor (2022).