He asks me to come by, read her some of my garden poems at four o’clock. June sun will be high and hot through the windows in her hospital room. She may sleep. The surgeons opened up her abdomen from stern to pubes and poked through the curves, bends, folds and cells that threatened to roll up and adhere into snowmen. They snipped out part of her small intestine, her uterus and speckled-egg ovaries. They sluiced her gut down with a warm chemo bath. Two layers sewed her together. One stapled. It’s solstice. Bedsheets dry in half an hour on the line. The redbud’s heart-leaves bathe in sunshine. To tell with snowmen. I can’t decide whether to tell her how ripe the raspberries are today.

the spider’s web

ravels, torn open

in the sprinkler’s blast