“That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool, drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking, shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water; to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others.” PoetryChangePoemFutureSafetyPresent Book:Stupid Hope: Poems Source: Stupid Hope: Poems
“Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear one more needle, one more insane orange pill, my sister, in silence, stood at the end of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet, which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin, and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails, which changed nothing in time except the way my mother was lost in it for a while as if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve. And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said the one or two words the living have for gratefulness, which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense of what it means to be alive long enough to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me, I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low and kind, or what failures and triumphs of the body and spirit brought her to that point— just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.” LoveLifeDeathHope Author:Jason Shinder