Phone Fugue #2
“Incidentally, I have dementia. I don’t know if you know that.”
My father casually tells me a year after his diagnosis.
I stifled nervous laughter. This blasé announcement six months
after I stood on a public street and sobbed
into my husband’s chest, six months after
I arranged in-home care, and called every assisted living facility
in northern California, a year after
we each signed a power of attorney form, a year after
his doctor took his car keys and I sold his car, a year after
he walked out of his apartment in his pajamas wielding an umbrella
and yelling at the neighbor “I’ve come to kill the cat!”
This selection comes from the collection Requiem: A Patrimony of Fugues, available from Diode Editions. Order your copy here. Our curator for December is Krista Cox.
Tina Schumann is the author of two poetry collections, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press,2019) and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010), which was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. Her work was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize and the New Issues Prize. She is the recipient of the 2009 American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal and a Pushcart nominee. She is the curator and editor of the anthology Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in various publications and anthologies, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Read more about Tina at http://www.tinaschumann.com
Krista Cox is a paralegal and poet living in northern Indiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Indianola Review, Whale Road Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among other places in print and online. She twice received the Lester M. Wolfson Student Award in Poetry, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. In her abundant spare time, Krista parents, paints, and plans community events as the Program Director of Lit Literary Collective. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about her at kristacox.me.
