Life expectancy

The nurse at my side has no love.
She watches TV, eats Chinese & takes my pills.
Switches my sopped diaper for a fresh
one just before the next sitter arrives.

She tells me crows are eating fat, purple figs.
Gently takes my hand, slips off my rings.
Dropped in her purse, they clink like coins.

I am a moon in the mirror. I’ve forgotten my face.
I have two bodies. One is a cold trap.
The other is a mist over the bed, a beaded pain.

follows a ghost into a bathroom,
is knocked into a dream.

In the shower

she flows to the drain.

Clare L. Martin is a poet-mother-wife. She is a graduate of University of Southwestern Louisiana and currently works as an associate editor with Southern Hum Press. Her work has appeared most recently in Clean Sheets, the anthology Beyond Katrina, Southern Hum and Farmhouse Magazine. Clare was a nominated finalist for the 2006 Farmhouse Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award, for her poem “4-way stop at dusk” which appeared in Farmhouse Magazine's May/June 2006 issue. She is also the playwright of  "Waterlines" produced in April 2006 as part of the project "Sustained Winds: Louisiana Artists respond to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita."