Chemo

    By Ed Bennett

“I’ve decided

that I really hate this,”

she laughed, a rasp

biting me.

“Don’t be so dour –

humor is good for us,

helps us get better”

or makes it easier

to cut the tether,

having heard the echo

of your laughter from

the unmentioned maw.

And so to bed

like a child’s afternoon nap

after milk and cookies

(except you can’t keep food down)

taking my arm

steadying yourself,

caressing my biceps,

our last intimacy

these threshold days.

© 2010 Ed Bennett

Ed Bennett is a Telecommunications Engineer living in Las Vegas and is a Staff Editor of Quill and Parchment.  Originally from New York City, his work appeared in The Manhattan Quarterly and The Patterson Literary Review where he was a finalist for the Alan Ginsberg Poetry Award in 1997. His work has appeared in The New Verse News, The Externalist, Philadelphia Poets, Quill and Parchment, Autumn Sky Poetry, and Touch: The Journal of Healing.  The Lives You Touch Publications will publish his chapbook, A Transit of Venus, later this year.