In your bedroom,
you hold me close
my chest shot-through from virus,
cylinders of light cracking my ribs
sternum woven shut,
me, gasping
I once wrote you a poem
titled “In Sickness & in Health”
lamenting on loss, your dissolution
but you’re here again,
a waterfall of yourself,
and I smell vanilla on your skin.
Is this devotion?
Or is this not knowing when to quit
smoking the cigarettes that will kill you?
Hanna Webster is a San Diego-based science writer, poet, and graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. She has a B.S. in neuroscience and creative writing from Western Washington University. You can read her work in Jeopardy Magazine, Beyond the Veil Press, The Xylom, and elsewhere.