The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead by Natalie Easton

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Scarlet II. Trading

Your hand on the hospital phone: you answered with
What? not with Who? as if the only question

you had left was not who called, but what else to relate:
what other diagnosis of your heart taking on water,

like your lung—I’m not in a hospital, I’m in a goddamn
ship on the ocean. The needle prodding, then a port—

for you were at a place for trading—plugged below
your collar-bone. You told me that strange things

were happening: the woman sharing your room died,
then returned the next day to take up her knitting.

I agreed it was upsetting. I said your family seemed
to want something, that my phone was always ringing;

Don’t you let them get away with that, you said.
They were never there for me. But they arrived in shifts

to hold up time, the junkie’s vein, and didn’t mind
if what you could offer was clean, or hard to come by;

they came to watch you revolve slowly into knowing
and out again, like an answer revealed, and then

months passing. I heard this from home, two states away,
impatiently strategizing the best time to step in:

                                           close, but not too near, to the end.

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