POETRY contest

GOODREADS POETRY CONTEST

Want your words to reach millions of people? Goodreads and the ¡POETRY! group have partnered to host an ongoing poetry contest. Join the ¡POETRY! group and vote each month to pick a winner from among the finalists. You can also submit a poem for consideration. Here is our October winner!

Picasso Woman

for Brenda

by Jeffrey Heath

Pink cap over shadow's scalp,
skin papered, pale, transparent.
A child watches,
color flowering from this forever bed
as we teach the ways to say goodbye.

Driving through the night,
I listened to your memory
for an uncoordinated time
as you never should have been,
ought to remain:

a Picasso woman
(laughing in your mirror at the top of my stair)
one ghost of a breast
where surgeon's carved at your cancer
like bad spots from an apple.

Now, less fifty pounds
carrying more years
than you've been given,
lying in hospital
facing the ironies of dying.

These hours seek distraction:

Nurses percolate through echoed halls.
A husband, son, cousins
force their conversation--
construction & farming, church & family,
cheerful, bland, sincere, devastated.

I arrive with a final bloodless daughter,
woman you helped raise.

Perhaps this
is what raises you from the dead
hours of long coma,
when only the question remained
of what more there was to keep you

here. Her kiss releasing.
Shiver, shudder of breath,
a final thundercrack whisper. 

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