February 2024
Marjorie Maddox
mmaddoxh@commonwealthu.edu
Bio Note: I live in Williamsport, PA, home of the Little League World Series, and have published 14 collections of poetry with two more forthcoming in 2024. I also have a collection of short stories and 4 children's books.

Catheterization

Start with the thin wisp
of hope some stranger hocked
in a hospital room while you waited—
heart pressed to chest—for your father
to die. Breathe in. Decades have skipped
to this beat with someone else dipping hope’s
thread into the tiny creek at your wrist, 
your fear swimming upstream to the damaged
cavern you inherited.  Breathe out. Papa, I hear
your rhythm, the hum of deceptive rest,
the steady syllables of persistence. 
What will hope find with its tiny eye,
with its very large memory of death?
Originally published in The Christian Century and used by permission of the author.

Valentines

	Patron Saints of Lovers

No cutie-pie cupid wings fluttering rings about the heart
or head, no fancy frilly two-way arrows, 
or rose-colored alphabets shaped into vows;
just a pretty trick of history, an early-spring wish
when birds twittered about each other,
and Roman schoolboys, for love of Juno, drew girls’ names 
to tease them mercilessly with swatches of soft goat hide—
all to guarantee purity, which has nothing 
to do with the celibate Valentines,
of which there were, indeed, two, 
although in different times and cities:
a priest, a bishop, passionately faithful, 
martyred separately, in love only with the red, 
red blood of Christ.
Previously published in First Things and in Weeknights at the Cathedral

Heredity

Before the E.R. doctor pronounced you
alive and partly well at 5:00 a.m., a stuffy morning
in July, when earlier even I, on the other side of our bed,
felt the pressure of your blood tighten 
in my constricted dreams; before your father's
chest, sawed open like a rotting tree,
and all the sawdust sifted to your genes;				
before your mother's warning stroke, my father's heart extracted
from a stranger, or the mastectomy 
that made my mother whole,
before that 5:00 a.m. when all I feared began again
almost, the failures of our parents' bodies
pooling up inside us, 

I loved and love the vows within your voice,
the loyalty of chromosomes passed on to child,
the DNA and discipline of doing 
that faithful day-to-day of what is half-inherited, 
the nucleus we nurture into love, 
each parent cell a paradox, 
reproducing through division
what we have and will become.
Originally published in Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation

©2024 Marjorie Maddox

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