Thomas Renjilian
The woman, now intubated, once tumbled
from a canoe into an Adirondack lake.
Her husband and grandson watched cold shatter
the warmth of June and her life preserver. Numb
on the dock, she spat what was left in her throat
and for days complained of salt burning her nostrils—
the grandson's first notion of the particular dark
inside his grandmother. Then he couldn't stop
seeing it. Inflamed pink sunset around two dark suns
like burning all the way to my brain flaring as she breathed
the morning's wet pine needles and said how sweet,
how worth the sting. From the face shield of a hazmat suit
the doctor observes her dying, lets us watch on a screen.
Her eyes flick to the periphery, the locked window
he turns us toward: a mountain, a skyline, the pink
phantom sting of the ending day's scentless air.