Marlene

If God is anywhere,
she is in the women
who care for the bodies
of the ill
and the injured
in our hospitals.
When you are at your most broken,
your most vulnerable,
she washes your feet
and tells you of her life in Honduras.
Her home was one hundred yards
from the ocean
and as a young woman,
swimming with her friends,
one might say to another -
Would you like to do laundry today?
And later they would meet by the river
to wash their clothes.
They would bring a picnic,
and by the time they were done
talking and laughing
their clothes would be dry,
and they could carry them home.

Sunday

I only have four memories
of you.
My favorite is Easter Sunday
when I was four years old.
After church, in your minister’s robes,
you gave potted purple pansies
to every child there.

Except for that one Sunday
my family never went to church;
My father had had enough
to last his whole lifetime
and mine as well.

It was the last time I saw you.
A few months later
you were struck down walking
the side of a road.

My grandmother took your ring
when she was sixteen years old.
Her parents wouldn’t let her wear it
for two more years.

When you died
she was waiting
with your youngest child
in your overheated car.

I’ve heard murmurs
that it was no accident -
that your mind was so troubled
you stepped into that road.

But I know what
my grandmother thought.

“He thought,” she told me,
all those years after,
“That he was just carrying
the water.”

She waited for you all of her days.

Letting go

There are those surgeons who
care about your scars -
physical and otherwise -
and those who don’t.
Forget about the one
who did not
and rest yourself in the hands
of the one who does.
Stop picking at your scars -
it doesn’t help -
And yes I know the pain
is the point:
it stops you from thinking,
which hurts you so much worse.
Remember that your body is just
a carriage for your brain,
and that today your brain is fine -
spinning beauty
from so much stone.
And so, by the way, are your bones -
still long and lovely,
carving shapes as they go.

In 2016, a medical diagnosis forced Annie Cook to leave her job as an English professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. As a result, she started spending more time writing. Her first novel is currently being considered in full at Writers House in New York. In addition, writing essays and poems has played an essential role in her coping. Annie received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014, where she also studied fiction writing at the graduate level with Lorrie Moore.