Tom
Mary Wilson
Sublingual Tom persuaded pain-free Tom to try an oral
indwelling or a best-route-to-the bed-pan kind of Tom
our Tom whose limbs raked sore and stiff, and Peri-persuaded
slow-release Tom of a three-day escalation or a three-day
dehydration where we find Tom nigh, at sunrise
on an earth stripped painfully of Tom as out the window
blinds a halo-Tom regards the light in-streaming through
a tube-injected day so mild and impermanent Tom observes
a day with properties of metal although later
when the hand-grasped bed-rail Tom
declined the intravenous sun inflected orally
and white-round tablet Tom, some pains, indwelling, visceral
unknown Tom couldn’t breathe, not well but wet and guttural
Tom, the Tom of buckets clanking in his depths, the time-
release Tom thrown against his stones Tom was en route
by that time on the third day Tom
Mary Wilson earned her MFA in Poetry from Brown University and is working towards a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in Everyday Genius, Gobbet, Sun’s Skeleton, and (occasionally) her blog: http://www.lean-to.blogspot.com.
