Flood
By Sherry Stuart Berman
for S.
All summer, on the news,
citrus-colored skies. Tiny suns
like Red Hots I could pop
in my mouth. Beautiful dust.
Deluge. My patient’s father texts me:
She’s intubated after using drugs
again, and he’ll send me a check.
How often had she said disease and
wish, smoothed her bangs
with the ringed fingers
of both hands. When I call him,
I’m skimming—as in, hard to know
or meant to find. I’m not a star,
right now, boiling an egg
is beyond me. A fork falls
and for hours I don’t notice
how blood frames my toenail.
Some days
the Amazon gods
leave poetry
on my doorstep. Hulu
and its mock heaven.
I tunnel back
to her chair, finally
stop drinking.
She won’t make it this time.
I’m a mother and scared
to feed my son. I talk to myself
in every room. How else
to admit failure?
Trauma-bodies; pain-
bodies: I pick their hearts
out one by one, lose
my place by the end
of a session.
Intimacy that’s not.
I save a dead woman’s text.
My son needs a feast and I
don’t. I don’t.
Maybe ghosts aren’t real
but I heard a sigh in that room,
turned and said, what?
I have this child and I had this love
and I could not see her through.
Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. Originally from South Florida, she is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.
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Holy shit. That was so, so good. 🤯