August 2018
I live with my husband, our two cats, and too many books and CDs in a smallish house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Many of those CDs are jazz, but not all are. We are also trying to live without a car (although Lyft helps us out in a pinch). Recently Pski's Porch published my book On the Other Side of the Window. I am also the editor of The Song Is..., a blog-zine for poems and prose inspired by music. Please come visit my site! https://thesongis.blogspot.com
On the Way to Boston City Hospital
we wander through a neighborhood
I rarely visited in real life.
In this dream,
I don’t carry books, pens, or
a notebook. I don’t stop to write.
No time or place in this world
for words on paper.
Clichés stick; poems slip away.
Without writing, the sky above
is smeared with wet blue-black ink,
clinging to us, our skin, our lungs,
corroding sidewalks and stairs.
Only City Hospital is free from this poison.
Collapsing, you refuse to go,
and I cannot carry your dead weight.
No cabs or buses trawl these streets.
We could not afford them anyway.
I can’t help you. Neither can I return
to my waking life without you.
I must follow where you lead.
Until I wake, breathless,
another man beside me
reminding me
I am no longer who I was.
On the Way to Boston City Hospital
we wander through a neighborhood
I rarely visited in real life.
In this dream,
I don’t carry books, pens, or
a notebook. I don’t stop to write.
No time or place in this world
for words on paper.
Clichés stick; poems slip away.
Without writing, the sky above
is smeared with wet blue-black ink,
clinging to us, our skin, our lungs,
corroding sidewalks and stairs.
Only City Hospital is free from this poison.
Collapsing, you refuse to go,
and I cannot carry your dead weight.
No cabs or buses trawl these streets.
We could not afford them anyway.
I can’t help you. Neither can I return
to my waking life without you.
I must follow where you lead.
Until I wake, breathless,
another man beside me
reminding me
I am no longer who I was.
“On the Way to Boston City Hospital” was originally published in Secrets and Dreams (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2016).
© 2018 Marianne Szlyk
© 2018 Marianne Szlyk
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