The hospice door was a bruise of brown paint
swollen in its frame. Inside, the air tasted
of disinfectant and old dust shaken
from an album spine. Thirty winters stacked

like cordwood between us. Then his arms
opened like parentheses
to hold my name. Donna.
A noun dissolving glaciers.

When the call came, gone, I reached,
past pronouns, past the static
of unopened mail.
I dug for words in Hugo House lamplight

where poets taught me how to bleed
onto the page without apology.
The church smelled of lilies and judgment.
Eyes like shuttered windows tracked me

to the mic. I unfolded the paper,
ts creases trembling like moth wings.
Voice raw as unvarnished oak,

I read…

You held me once in vanished light
when I was someone else’s daughter.
Time rewrote our blood in separate fonts,
yet here we are, ink smudged by grace,
this final stanza where you traced
forgiveness on my face.

Silence pooled…

like spilt mercury. Then came
the crumpling sounds: tissues pressed
to eyelids, throats thick with wet stones.
Hands reached, not claws, but open palms,

asking for copies of this fragile scar,
stitched from grief’s thin thread.
No monument. No anthology shelf.
Just that room where poetry pried

one hinge loose in a rusted world,
and for a breath, the door stayed open.