Untelling
BLUE NIGHT AT THE NURSING HOME
Marianne Worthington
The bedsteads are separated by the thinnest
of curtains at Hillcrest North, the old TB
sanatorium, where long ago, my father
would visit his Uncle Theo, afflicted
with consumption. Now my father
is bedfast in these wards and his nurse
explains that the blue spots marbling
his legs, the arms, the penis are forerunners
of what’s to come. She whispers
the cliché: It won’t be long now.
Death is a sigh hampered
in the corner of a sick room.
By the river the blue heron stands
and waits, poised in the long patience.
Overhead the florescent lights hum
all night. We drape ourselves around his bed,
eavesdrop as the oxygen mask hisses
at his dwindling fires, kiss of cool steam.
Italicized lines from “After Failing to Receive His Appointment from the Emperor the Chinese Poet Reconsiders the World” by Jeff Daniel Marion, The Chinese Poet Awakens (Wind, 1999).
Marianne Worthington is cofounder and poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Shenandoah, Swing, and Salvation South, among other places. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and artist grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship Program. She coedited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and is author of a poetry chapbook. Her poetry collection is The Girl Singer (University of Kentucky Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeast Kentucky.
ISSUE 1 | SUMMER 2024
