Pleural Effusion
BY ALEXANDRA SMEREKA
It must have felt like drowning
to wake with water
on the lungs, water not in
but on the lungs, another symptom
of kidney failure, itself a symptom of red
blood cells breaking apart like waves
against rocks. Doctors, unsure why the body would break
itself so suddenly, poured into and out of the room.
Our mother, the moon, calling them back, pouring herself
into watching over. How lonely
it must have felt to carry alone
the knowledge of how close my sister
came to dying. To be told that she would. That knowing
must have felt like drowning.
Port
BY ALEXANDRA SMEREKA
For my twin living with aHUS
home in a storm, the left side
of a boat, the entrance
under my sister’s collarbone
that admits her $40,000 meds.
Also, the exit
as her blood traveled through
the tubes of a plasmapheresis
machine like flat coke
through a bendy straw. The blood
darker than I thought it would be.
For a while there was dialysis
every day. When I asked our parents
if she was dying, they scolded me
for asking. No one would tell
me anything. That summer, silence
accompanied me to every room.
It was a liquid quiet.
It moved.
At Grandma’s Bedside in Hospice I Think of Lighthouses
BY ALEXANDRA SMEREKA
From the bed we must seem a distant shore,
different degrees of slouched
in our chairs against the window, mostly
silhouettes in the dim light.
We watch over her as she used to watch over us
and turn our heads when she moves
or a nurse walks by the room.
Sometimes we look at each other. She sleeps
with her mouth open.
Our eyes flicker at the pause between
each rattling breath. We’re encouraged
to touch, to hold
her hand. I do not want to, afraid I’ll feel
the moment she dies.
My mom died here 5 years ago. I did
not touch her either.
In hospice, visiting hours never end.
How do you decide to leave, knowing she might
not be alive the next time you see her?
I won’t sleep tonight. When the sun rises,
I’ll think of how she taught me to navigate
a channel: red, right, returning.
So much lives at the shores of her mind.
I should have asked more questions. I should
have sat in that stillness longer, her an echo
of her daughter: same hospital, different room,
eyes closed, mouth an estuary emptying
into the sea.
