by Cecil Morris

We were condemned to watch our daughter’s death
as it unfolded, a slow torture and sudden finality.
We watched how she lifted the bad news above her head
and tried to refuse it, to deny it, like the pre-school child
who disavows her wall art with the red crayon
still warm in her hand. She tried next to make of it
an anthem, a cause, a decorative resistance,
a full-dress rebellion against fate, against prognosis.
We remembered her refusing bedtime and calculus
and every limit we tried to impose on her
until we all shouted and cried and she finally fled.

So we took her lead. We, too, denied this news,
refused this sentence, pretended not to understand
the subtext of doctors’ slow words
and their studied non-committal ambiguity.
We became experts at disbelieving what we saw
and treated our eyes as unreliable traitors,
as suspect narrators in modernist novels.
We stayed her cheerleaders, her supporters,
her connections for headscarves and wigs
and frozen yogurt and weed-infused muddy buddies.

We were her unseeing companions stationed
beside the mechanical bed and metallic tree
with its vine draining magic sap into her.
We soothed her forehead with cool cloth
and squeezed water from the damp sponge
even when she closed her dry lips.
We remembered touching the baby spoon
of puréed food to her clamped mouth
and saying abracadabra and open sesame.

We heard the long pause after her last breath.

Cecil Morris, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The 2River View, Common Ground Review, Hole in the Head Review, Lascaux Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2025.