Christian Sammartino
Equinox / Outbreak
Today the sun is an IV bag dripping
light to us through a slender tube of clouds.
We call this the first day of spring,
a slow trickle of raindrops pleading with the earth
to forget all this violence. Forget the body
and it’s breaking. Forget the feeling a fever
makes in the morning mist as it dispatches
chills through the lightning rod of your spine.
Today’s first color is the sharp silver tip of a needle
gleaming in my wife’s arm in the emergency room.
The first sound of spring is her name
becoming a hospital bracelet in my mouth,
Followed by the unfolding of pediatric masks
over our mouths to sequester our breathing.
In the waiting room, I gaze at the sky and see a weather
system of hospital beds floating above East Marshall Street.
All the clouds have been quarantined
and are working from home. Maybe they labor
hand making miracles or testing kits to spare
the people I love from the angel of death.
Maybe they rest beside the god I pray my wife
does not meet today or the next day.
But maybe they never took the doctors’ orders,
and are still above us, pleading for her fever to break
into conservatories flush with lush flowers, mercifully
returning from their slumber in the underworld.
I have never wished harder for her body
to personify springtime, for her to become
a garden of crocuses, perennially returning
to me from the relentless oblivion of winter.
—Submitted on 09/12/2020
Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.
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