Values

    by Toni L. Wilkes

Cranky to be locked in a hospital room,

a situation we’re unprepared or unwilling

to traverse.  But then, what in life prepares

us for three a.m. meetings with neurosurgeons

to survey x-rays where her brain’s

blood vessels look like the web of a poisonous

spider, and husband and mother are somehow

supposed to make sense of its pathways,

intersections, clusters that require a titanium clip—

Will she set off metal detectors in airports?

In the blur of three a.m. consults who cares

about airport security?  Can she have more children?

As if you live on some farm in the 1800’s and need

more children to survive.  Fixating on the irrelevant

when the horrors of the immediate overwhelm.

© 2009 Toni L. Wilkes

Toni L. Wilkes graduated from UCLA. Toni’s first chapbook, Stepping Through Moons, is soon to be published by Finishing Line Press.  Her work also appears or is forthcoming in Confrontation, Folio, GW Review, Roanoke Review, Rosebud, Sow’s Ear, Texas Review, and other noted journals.  Toni lives in Santa Rosa, California.