BY TORI GRANT WELHOUSE

:: I doze when she dozes. Light

behind my eyes, grooves in the imperfectly drawn.

:: Her hospice overlooks a rock quarry.

:: She’s a nurse. The sicker the better.

:: The morphine makes her hallucinate.

:: Memories in her moans, reeling home movies.

:: Her heavy head in my lap on long car rides.

Girlish constellation of freckles on her Fuji cheeks.

:: We could touch the stars from our bedroom window.

Heads together, comfort of our bodies.

:: The tires of her wheelchair get stuck, ratcheting

back and forth on the rutted path.

:: It hurts to laugh.

:: The current unraveling of her night sky,

radiating lines of blue, gold and black.

:: The lines sympathize in my sleep.

:: She moves like syrup to a lullish lullaby.

:: Repeated naps like falling. Always to the same.

:: She can't eat, swallows through a striped straw.

:: The hallways end at Exit.

:: Late afternoon stirs motes in the air.

:: The cards aren't lucky. She lays down the spades.

:: The pooling of her ankles.

:: The lines deconstruct, break-off.

She hands me a drawing like a meteorite.

:: Not long now.

Tori Grant Welhouse’s poems have appeared most recently in HerWords and Chestnut Review, and she was a runner-up for the Princemere Prize. She won Skyrocket Press's 2019 novel-writing contest for her YA fantasy The Fergus and Etching Press’s 2020 poetry chapbook competition for Vaginas Need Air. More at www.torigrantwelhouse.com.

Process Note: I lost my sister rather suddenly to cancer. In the year she got sick, and immediately after she died, I experienced extraordinarily vivid dreams. I began a series of what I called “dream poems.” The rule was the poem had to include an image, word or action from the dream landscape. “zig :: zag” is one of the dream poems.