By Veronica Kornberg

The four of us—Kathie, Ruth,
our mom, and I—drove down
to Maryland to visit Annie
in the coma hospital where
she’d been sent after she
opened her eyes and moved
one finger. The place
was great—therapy
six hours a day and nurses
like strong, funny angels
swooping around her railed bed.
One terrifying thing—
every week, the team tested Annie
to see if she’d made
enough progress to stay
another week, and if she hadn’t
she’d be moved elsewhere,
somewhere not so great
but nobody knew where,
there was no where—we should call
our congressman and tell him
to do something.

That day was bright
and cold. We wheeled Annie
outside and sat on a bench by
the parking lot, squinting into
the winter-low sun amid
pocked mounds of plowed snow
that had hardened to ice.
We chatted in Annie’s direction—
about a cardinal in the naked dogwood,
about mom’s poodle barking hysterically at
a snow woman in the yard,
about the balls of yarn slowly morphing
into a crocheted afghan on the recliner.
I heard us packing the silent spaces,
cramming them full of news and pictures.
Annie didn’t have many words
but she could still make her famous
bird face to show a little sarcasm
so that made the conversation feel
familiar and less desperate. Annie began
to fixate on our mother. “She is scary,”
she stammered. A kind of miracle—
Annie speaking a complete sentence.
Our mother blanched,
then made a goofy-ugly face.
“Scary,” she chimed, waving her
gloved fingers. It was the most
adult thing I’ve ever seen,
the way she swallowed that pain
and turned it into a sweet
lick of icing, a joke, a little nothing.
God it was awful.

Halfway home we stopped for the night
at a freeway motel, the four of us
in one room. In the lobby, we scarfed down
a buffet—honeyed ham
and gloppy macaroni salad,
dinner rolls spongy and soft as
an old man’s belly. There were two double
beds in the room and when I plopped
on the corner of one, the whole mattress
flew up toward the ceiling in a way
that I cannot explain the physics of
to this day. But I kept doing it,
the mattress jack-knifing in the dim room
until we were all laughing
and laughing—we laughed until
we cried we were laughing so hard.

By Sara T. Baker

as she takes off her bra to put on a hospital gown.
She motions for me to pick it up off the floor,
which still has spots of blood or plasma
on it. I glance at her breasts, small-nippled
like my own, although one is dented
where they did the biopsy. She tells me
about that every time, how they deformed
her. Then she climbs, regal, into the hospital bed.
In the bed, she is pale under the fluorescent
lights, although her diamonds wink on either side
of her face. Her bedazzling smile is at rest,
her cheekbones rise over sunken cheeks,
her brow is furrowed, her hazel eyes flutter
behind purple lids, her roots need touching up.
She’s had work done, but dementia has
elided that fact, which seems to me
the best of all possible worlds.
The gorgeous male doctor comes in
with a homely male nurse to report
The tumor is bigger and you have to do
something. His cobalt eyes lock intently
on mine across my mother’s supine body.
I imagine swimming in that blue, freestyling,
one rhythmic stroke after the other. My weary
voice explains We have been waiting weeks
to see the oncologist, even as my body is flipturning
in his eyes, my nostrils full of chlorine
and Coppertone.

None of which my mother hears, as, mercifully,
she isn’t wearing her hearing aids. But when
the men leave, she slides her eyes over to me
and asks Which one was the doctor?
The tall one, I answer.
She cocks an eyebrow.
Fit? The bluest eyes?
Yes, I say, that one.

Not that I noticed, she adds,
with a shrug and a laugh.

By John Bargowski

She was going in for new valves
and a bypass later that week,
so my mother asked me to drive her
to the bank where she signed a log
the branch manager initialed
before he swung the vault open
and let us into that metallic space
walled with rows of numbered doors.
His key first in the one with her number,
then hers in the other slot,
and the steel box she’d earned
by her loyalty slid from its shelf.
He led us to a private closet
with a chair and small table,
and when she lifted the box lid
there they were—the deed for a remnant
of the family farm, the cancelled
house mortgage, a copy of the title
for the last car my father owned,
his 30-year plaque from the slaughterhouse,
and a pinky ring with his initials,
a certificate for a stock gone bust,
her mother’s gold wedding band,
the Silver Anniversary bracelet
she wore only to weddings,
a lock of hair from my first haircut,
and under it all, her bridal corsage,
wrapped in yellowed cellophane,
and while I stood near she peered
inside the manila envelopes
that held the legal papers,
touched each piece of jewelry,
the curl of hair, and tattered remains
of the corsage she’d worn
just above her heart, a desiccated
rosebud pierced with a rusted pin.