Visitation
Black witch moth
poses between
certainty and superstition
above the
threshold,
where others
would hang a horseshoe or cross.
According to
folklore from the Rio Grande
to Jamaica by
way of Brazil,
Death follows
when he enters,
but we do not
fear fate.
My husband’s
father passed last week,
so we welcome
the moth into the quiet
of our Sunday
routine.
All morning, he
remains in place
as we slump to
sofas to read news and novels,
walk dogs, play
scrabble.
He vanishes without
sound or ceremony,
a soul come to
say goodbye.
Widow’s Words Unspoken
When you
flatlined, I slumped in the hospital chair,
My
disappointment and sweaty thighs
supported by
industrial-grade vinyl,
your waxy
fingers twisted into my wrinkled palm.
How dare you
desert me after sixty-odd years!
leaving me
nothing but a funeral to plan
for a smattering
of unfamiliar belonging to our son’s friends,
and the new
pastor, a young man with no Sunday morning memories
of you
highlighting scripture from a third-row pew.
Why couldn’t you
have dropped dead twenty years ago?
I had prospects.
I might have
returned to nursing,
assisting doctors
as they corrected cleft palates
under a Honduran
canopy of trailing vines and squawking macaws.
Or sailed from
Seattle to Alaska with my sister
to watch
blue-green icebergs shiver southward
slowly as women
of a certain age,
their true
depths hidden like underwater shipwrecks
they left
behind.
I could have
married Bob after Martha died.
So often, I’ve
pictured the two of us
like Diane
Keaton and Jack Nicholson,
fishing for
trout in a snow-fed Colorado stream,
real-life stars
of a late-in-life rom-com.
Instead, I
suffered twenty-five years
watching you
piddle your retirement away
at home-
repairing broken radios, flipping channels,
or emailing
distant cousins
to trace your
family tree back to Adam and Eve.
Now Bob’s got
Alzheimer’s, and my sister’s gone,
as has my
ability to navigate the wheeled walker across rooms
without knocking
over stacks of your Elmer Kelton westerns,
and medicine
bottles you left unscrewed,
spilling pills
across the carpet
next to where I
accidentally overturned the box of your ashes,
leaving me to
contemplate the scattered remains of my life
until the maid
comes next Thursday to vacuum.
Last Watch
she sits watch
as night jitters
and stammers,
cartwheels into
day.
pain punches his
clenched, clawed hands
to flutter
forward,
though wandering
fingers
grasp at
white-sheet retreat.
morning glares
fluorescent.
his teeth
chatter,
choke him into
momentary silence,
each episode
jacks up momentum.
time rushes
forward, runs away.
hope for him
crumples
like paper
swallows
whirled away in
gasped gusts.
intensity
increases,
inflames his
torso to snake-dance writhe,
hammers blood
pressure skyward,
sets hospital
bells carnival ringing.
there is no
prize.
she strokes his
storm-cloud hair,
chronicles
decline
through
distancing spectacles.
unable to ford
the arch of her nose,
they slide down
like tears,
as he slips
across the final bridge.
JEAN HACKETT lives and writes in
San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country.
Her most recent work has appeared in journals Plants and Poetry and
Voices de la Luna, anthologies The Stars and Moon in the Evening Sky, Purifying
Wind, No Season for Silence, Easing the Edges, and Yellow Flag, as well as Arts
Alive San Antonio. Her chapbook Masked/Unmuted was published in March, 2022.
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