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. 

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