by Alina Marks

Created on: January 28, 2009

Diagnosis

From behind the door that swooshed
and clicked through the night, they entered.
One by one,
sometimes two or three blue shadows
in surgical masks.

One night has passed
and through it, I listened to the struggle
of your heartbeat, irrational
and manic as a madman that stands
at the edged rim of a sea, separating life
and death.

And in the morning
your lips were stained violet and blue,
a combination of purple hospital popsicles
and anemia. The early sunshine
cast subtle shades of maple and jaundice
across your face.

But from behind the door that swooshed
and clicked through the night, they entered.
One by one, sometimes two or three, and
just as we had falsely convinced ourselves
that it was only an infection because the fever
dropped and it wasn't as cold
in the room that day,
and because you were hungry,

The second one said
Leukemia.

And before those words, that traveled
from behind the door that swooshed
and clicked through the night,
had entered, there was a wind,
a ticking breeze

not dissimilar to those lingering apparitions
that sometimes hover in old motel lobbies
or abandoned city tunnels
in the middle of the night.

It blew into the room
long before the diagnosis
even reached your ears.

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