by Myronn Hardy

Fall into that easy silence.
She seems more straw than human beneath cotton blankets.  Never that face   never those tubes
in her mouth like stems severed
from a poisonous tree.
In a procession    we follow
her wheeled bed through
the hall to the steel
box of the elevator.
I notice winter in your hair    never
winter but now winter.
Years earlier    another
procession among mourning
nuns at night.  Waterfalls
fell into each other.
What I feel is ending.
I’m turning away from ending.

by Sandee Gertz

Just past the downed moss tree, fungal
white ribbons dance in sacred sequence

as I sit among all that’s fallen in the South,
to derechos, tornados,

thinking of how you said you wanted me
to see what you see: Ice on the Hudson

and a shadow cast across a sky
leaning into dusk; the shine of snow
on cobalt. And I do, on a walk

900 miles away – reading my lifeline
in the veins of a leaf, fossilized from Fall,
and in the mud-swirls from the latest rains

thinking of you there, your Northern gaze landing
on the river, far from our smoggy shared city
of bridges, your truck parked on a slant of dirt

I will always follow. Tell me: when your chest tightens,
Does your breath chill, exhaling the past? Or warm
as I inhale Nashville’s Southern mass?

Staring out to a lake where herons will not alight,
and sparrows flock toward the beekeeper’s hood.
As I take off layers in the sun’s fullness, does your ice crack?

I know you stay the day throwing rocks at aimless gray.
No matter how small you become, walking
away toward the twinkle lights of houses, home,

My eyes will always see with razor’s vision,
winter for you there,
And for me, spring.

by Sandee Gertz

Most of earth’s action is hidden from view
Like the things you tried to tell me in the ICU,
pointing to my silver bracelet, my mouth empty,
though I was the interpreter.

Appointed by Dad who could not read your lips,
the tubes to the throat a lisp, like your ghost
was already talking while I guessed and grabbed
at syllables from the air around us.

I thought you liked the silver around my wrist,
But there was more: the tap tapping you did there,
Insistent as your arms tied to the bed, mouthing
I don’t…want ____ here…

We expand the boundaries of our reach
when stars appear. And so I tried again,
birthing the formation of an earth.
As my sister in law knew that death
is much like being born
and coached you to the sliver of light.

I wanted to fill in the blank words,
But instead doubled over when I heard
your midnight breaths,
the tectonic plates of our valley shifting.

The Rain comes in many forms
And sometimes it is a washcloth laid

On a forehead when you’re 12 and
Day’s of Our Lives plays on the unmounted television.

Driving home, at the streetlight of the old neighborhood
I saw you, pushing up the pedal pants above your knees
in the dandelioned yard to catch the rays on David Street
and all the artificial suns fell to the earth.

It was the first time I heard God speak:

Honeysuckle
Thunder

It wasn’t my bracelet at all.
It was yours, your name, a birthdate, a place.

The tapping a translation.

by Sandee Gertz

What is the weight and imprint of a town?
Our place in etched map indents
or cut gemstone rock from underneath our feet?
The professor holds up slides of geo-designs:
one by one, exposing the underworld
of the State of Pennsylvania.

And I can’t help but wonder what lay beneath
my calico print bed on David Street, Johnstown.
Or by the copper creek: its orange tinge grown
from chemical agents, chasing us the day we ran
from the flood walls — the ones the Army Corp of Engineers
raised higher and higher after each deluge:
1889, 1936, 1977.

She holds the shape of a perfect moon in her hands,
it hangs on the slides like the open mouths of caves,
the origins of slag and sediment.
I think of them as jewels I could press to my chest,
conjuring designs that would spring
from my steel town’s unnavigable paths
to the Atlantic — its infancy spent stretched
from Mexico to Newfoundland –
its printed legacy falling across my throat.

Photos of students on assignment smile while
digging up the East Sides’ gentrifying core.
Water collected from the undersides
of empty storefront earth,
local park benches where no one sits, is stored
in bins that strain through test tubes and petri dishes
and is catalogued in ways I’ll never understand.

But those fires, cores, artifacts – raw rock and crystals I claim
from the peaks of my Western Pennsylvania hilltops–
what sails above and lies far beneath the Conemaugh Gap.
Could an ancient flood stone rest upon my wrist?
Could my pulse be kept by a fossiled imprint
of the Little Conemaugh’s rocky bottom?