Three Poems
Cameron Morse Grasp Reflex This bright cold blue green glazes over your dark eyes at the windowpane. What the world is to you is what I am to you because you can see no farther than my face. When you cry, you cry because the green blue cold of me is too much for you. I shush you like the wind. I lie down next to you and stroke your palm until your tiny fingers open and close, until all four of your fingers wrap around the tip of one of my mine because I am huge. You cannot imagine how big I am. Hives In the waiting room at Saint Luke’s Imaging, Mom watches Hurricane Irma flail Florida’s side. In the machine my catheter stabs its icicle of contrast dye into my arm. A sneeze rises in my nostrils like the flames of a prairie fire. Lay still, says the voice of God over the intercom. I obey. The needlepoint of beestings stitches an itchy stigmata into my side. Despite the Benadryl and methylprednisolone, red clouds drift across my scalp. At First Watch in Westport, I peel off the co-bind and wash the wine stain of my blood out of my Mother’s eyes. Mansions When my estranged father threatens with his name on the deed to toss us out on the street, I clip the year’s last red blossom from the rosebush for a jar on the kitchen counter. Time to hunker down for winter. Lying in, Lili breastfeeds, her deflated belly puffing below the newborn in her arms. In the witchy bramble of crab apple tree branches, the martin’s house rocks at the end of a cable anchored to the bough. Suspended between heaven and earth, we sit in the sunroom on a cloudy day. All the birds have gone away. |
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About the Author: Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with Glioblastoma in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and lives with his wife, Lili, and newborn son, Theodore, in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in over 75 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is coming out in January from Glass Lyre Press.