An excerpt from The Death Cycle Machine: Poems by Charlotte Mayerson

The Dead Watch Over Us

What's wrong? "I can't lie down."
Why not? "I fell again."
Where? "On Forty-second street"
On Forty-second Street?
"So," he wants to know,
"Would it be nicer to do
On Park Avenue?"
Smart ass.

I plummet into bottomless sleep,
Can't find my home room,
Board the wrong train,
A steel ramp
Relentlessly tumbles me
Back where I started
Until, rewired like a new mother
To her babe, a faint gasp
Makes me lap to his bed,
Pummel his back,
Prop up his head.
"Tea," he whispers,
"Let's try tea."

It's ten degrees outside
But so fetid, so thick, the sickness
Inside, I crack the window,
And by that time
Need something fine
To unsnag the creeping vine
Caught in my spine.
Now, just sliding under the Big Red,
I remember the still-open window
By his bed.
Flow gently, sweet Afton,
Disturb not his head.

Yet in the only bed I can find
Lies not my child, but my father
With his look of a chieftain:
"A prince," my mother said,
Hand soft on his coffin,
"He was always like a prince."

Not in this place.
Here, his nose has decomposed
A chalky decay soils his cheek.
I shriek at him until it rips my throat,
"Daddy, Daddy,
You never listen to me!
Never!
Robert's so sick
And you do
Nothing to help us.
Nothing!"

My lies slice the air
To seek and destroy his heart.
"No, no, please," comes the dear old voice,
"I beg you...
I always listen to you, sweetheart."

I'm wild now
To find my child
To jam the window tight
Against the cold night...

But in this new lemon-lit room
There are only empty beds
Covered with cracked and yellowing plastic.

There is no doubt:
Those who once lay in these beds,
The former patients,
All,
Are now dead.

Burnt Offering

Listen, You,
Hear my noble silence?
Observe my gallantry?
A burnt offering, this body.
Charred.
Hinenee,
Here am I,
Accept this sacrifice,
Turn Your blind eye
To this pyre,
Save him, Bastard.