Kat flips on the breathing machine,
struggles to know peace. Trembling comes
to her in this nightly ritual, this thing
the doctor ordered her. Smoking, she's more
still, calm; the things we call ourselves at
our best when we're not the ones dying,
collapsing into what lungs were before
they were lungs.
Happiness is a hummingbird, tricked to the
nectar in a plastic flower by the porch door. In the end
all that moves is the creak of the puzzle table,
the whip of a straightened Sunday paper, and a disapproving
cough returns my grandmother to me.
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