*

Poet Greg Hill writes: “It has been some time since I myself lived in Somerville (54 Bay State with four roommates), but I am fond of the time I spent there in the Davis Square area and in and around Boston.” Greg Hill is a poet and a flash fiction writer in West Hartford, Connecticut. His work has appeared in Barzakh, Grub Street, Have Has Had, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere. He and his wife enjoy the struggle of raising three determined feminists. Website: https://www.gregjhill.com.

Poet Greg Hill

Waiting

She is there now, shambling down
the cold corridor, holding her husband’s hand,
their walk is somber, but unintentionally so,
they have little fear of the surgery,
they know the doctors well,
it is just that they have been here before.

Their quiet conversation, unheard
at the other end of that bright, barren hall,
is about their boys, the one who is driving in to see them now,
the other teaching in his distant classroom,
perhaps a lesson on Keats.

She used to teach English too, long ago,
before the first bout with cancer
when her teeming brain first accepted
the dark possibility—a lonely walk down
a moonlit shore of the wide world,
separating finite beach and infinite black ocean.

They remember their boys at eight and five,
twenty years back, when they knew only
love, and not until years later
could even contemplate
such improbable odds against her.

Machines purr endlessly, coolant systems,
regulators beeping in various rooms,
the doctors will be with them in a minute.

— Greg Hill