Dwayne moved home to help his aging parents.
We’d have Cokes on their porch. After
a beach week they brought us salt-water taffy.
Dwayne’s stomach hurt, his appetite was gone.
His clothes looked like they hung on a hook, not a man. The doctor ordered studies, a biopsy:
Pancreatic cancer.
We told them about hospice. Fentanyl
was like god for him, eased the pain.
What was his mother’s name? Ernestine.
His father was also Dwayne. Senior. The lights—
without sirens—finally came, not to save him
but to pronounce his death.
Maybe they were the same thing.
David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton’s poems have appeared in Willows Wept Review, Unlost, One Sentence Poems, and previously in Red Eft Review. He holds an MFA from Regis University. He lives near (sometimes in) the Colorado Rocky Mountains with his wife and several miniature poodles.
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