- Mar 21
- 1 min read
End of Life Care
You always had a story. The slingshot of narrative
so potent I could feel my childhood balloon.
You told stories of a malicious gator crouched
in the swamp behind our house, how the vans
parked outside weren’t painters, no, but lovers
conducting an affair. Panic loomed
until I stepped outside. Ordinary everywhere.
In the evening of your life, my brother and I
sat on the sawtooth stairs and listened to you sing.
Four notes, do doo do doo, for hours to yourself.
Sometimes years. You’d sit at dinner with a glass
half full, cross-legged, suspenders fastened,
looking somewhere I couldn’t see. Past
my right eye, you told the story of your college
days, how the co-eds far outnumbered you.
That path used to lead somewhere, but now
a row of stones and only the numbers remain. 5000
women, 1000 men. You’d need a Dun and Bradstreet
to get a date, you said. But you did, and you did.
And you made us all. Even this is lost to time.
Our memory care team wets your face with a rag,
tells my father that these neural deaths
will cease eventually. One day, gone in a flash.
The songs you’re so bent on worming into our ear
will suffocate. Like a lightning bug in a clear glass jar.
MCLEOD LOGUE is originally from Alabama and received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she taught creative writing. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology: Alabama, West Branch, Blackbird, Nashville Review, and elsewhere.